David Arquette Reveals Why It Was Important For Him To Win WCW World Title

Filed to GERWECK.NET:

Wrestling Inc. – David Arquette Interview

Conducted by Wrestling Inc. Managing Editor Nick Hausman
Video Link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EymIW7mFLL4
Audio Link – https://audioboom.com/posts/7670055-wwe-s-reported-positive-covid-test-count-wrestlemania-37-plans-feat-david-arquette

On why he decided it was time for him to return to pro wrestling:

It was really 20 years building up to it. I’d gone to Staples Center events, WWE events. Whenever I’d be traveling, wherever I could, I’d go see a match, and then some fans would be cool and say, ‘what’s up champ?’ Just have fun with it, but then a lot of people just really hated me. I took Christina one time, and she’s like, ‘I can’t believe you come to these things. Like people are so mean to you. Like you’re a sensitive person. It’s weird that you’d come, and it was always just eating at me. So it was just something I knew I had to address.

I got a surgery, and I came out and I was like, I really want to address this wrestling thing. She was like, ‘what are you talking about?’ She didn’t really understand what I was doing, but she got on board, and at the end of the day, she really is the one who deserves the belt because she is the champion for producing the movie for dealing with me through it and just for being a badass.

On his and the WCW locker room’s reaction to him winning the WCW World Championship:

When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘this that’s a terrible idea. We can’t do that. There was a story-line that they were setting up between Jeff Jarrett and Diamond Dallas Page. So he was saying like, ‘listen, you don’t have to do it, but if you don’t, the promotion [for] ‘Ready to Rumble’ and ‘Ready to Rumble’ essentially is dead now, and that’s it. You won’t wrestle anymore.

You won’t be traveling with us, and I was like, ‘wait, I get to travel with you?’ I found out that yeah, you get to stay on till the PPV that was like two weeks away. So I get to travel and wrestle kind of live my dream for two weeks. I was like, ‘OK, I’ll do it’ because I wanted to have that experience of being part of the thing.

I just never knew that I was going to be such an outcast, but after I won the belt, I was sitting in the locker room [before] one of the next times I was supposed to go out, and Booker T was getting ready and I said, ‘how many times have you been champ Booker T?’ He said, ‘I’ve never been the champ,’ and that really hit me,” Arquette admitted. “I was like, ‘oh damn.’ Then it made a lot of sense like why people were so upset, and I got it a lot more.

I just thought of it more as like a kid. You know what I mean? I fell in love with wrestling as a kid. I kind of looked at it, to that point, the way a kid looks at it. So it wasn’t as serious and really deep as I learned it to be.

On a controversial scene from the documentary where he and RJ City show how they put together a match:

Yeah, I was really concerned about that because I kind of am old school despite what you might think. I do love all the tradition of it, but RJ had a lot to do with the construction of that scene and kind of telling that story. So I was concerned. I called Yuma, the booker and producer of the segment and Nick, the referee, and I was like, ‘are you guys alright with this.’ And they were cool.

I asked them, ‘has this ever been done before on film? Like are we doing a thing we’re not supposed to do?’ And people explain that the business has changed and it has been done before depending on how you do it. It’s like certain things. Like we don’t do it in the Lucha stuff. We do it in that match, but then we don’t do it in other stuff. So we did try to protect it. I don’t know. It’s a little controversial. I’m still on the fence, but I love the sequence. I love letting people in to that side of the business and showing them, even though it’s sort of choreographed in a sense, that it’s just very real and very painful.

On if he feels happier now having gone on his return to pro wrestling journey:

I do. I mean in the film we’re telling stories. There’s a lot of sadness. I mean there’s a lot of sadness for just life in general. Life’s not easy for a lot of people. Losing my parents, losing my sister, different things really sort of are still in there and painful, but to be able to deal with them and to really figure out your own self-worth and believe in yourself, that was the real message in this movie.