Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [143]
If that’s true, I’m gonna do that now.
Danny, I totally and unconditionally forgive you for everything that happened with my mother and I sincerely want you to live the rest of your life in peace. God bless you.
CHAPTER 39
CSI: Sheboygan
One of the reasons I decided to walk away from the WWE was that there were other things I wanted to accomplish in my life. I wanted to spend more time with my family, tour the world with Fozzy, and truly study the art of acting.
I was curious as to what I could do in Hollywood, and while I had no great expectations of becoming the next Rock, I still wanted to learn the intricate details of the craft—how an actor studied, how he performed, how he worked, and how he became great.
I found it interesting that whenever I had meetings with directors or producers in Hollywood, they seemed to view wrestling as the redheaded stepchild of the entertainment world. (PC Author’s Note: I personally love all redheaded stepchildren.) It was almost as if they thought wrestlers were bumbling Neanderthals who couldn’t string two sentences together.
They usually asked me if I had ever done any acting before, and I would think, “Shit, hambone, I’ve been playing the part of Chris Jericho for years!”
Working in the WWE was akin to show business boot camp. During the six years I was there, I’d learned a little about every aspect of the entertainment world. I’d done action, comedy, drama, worked backstage and in front of a live audience, hit my marks, took my cues, did my own stunts, danced, sang, juggled, and threw my voice. Hell, I could even be a key grip or best boy if I had to.
I did some research and eventually hooked up with an acting teacher in Los Angeles named Kirk Baltz. Kirk was an accomplished actor who had worked with Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers, and Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs, a movie where he played his most famous role as Marvin Nash, the cop who gets his ear hacked off by Michael Madsen. There’s even a Marvin Nash action figure—complete with removable ear.
Kirk was the real deal, a true Method actor who was very serious about the art of the theater, and he was exactly what I was looking for in a coach.
But when I went to his studio for our first class, I had no idea what I was getting into. I thought we were just going to go over a bunch of lines and do a few scenes together. I was pretty good at playing a character and fully expected to take Kirk by storm with my master thespian abilities.
But instead he sat me on a bench in a darkened room and told me to rotate my shoulders while holding them out beside me in the classic Jericho pose. Then he told me to close my eyes and hum underneath my breath—ummmmmmmmm — then insisted I bellow out a deep-throated guttural grunt—Hah!
I couldn’t figure what this witchy hybrid of yoga and therapy had to do with acting. When I posed the question to Kirk, he explained that it was all part of the “dropping in” process, the crux of Method acting. Dropping in helped you to achieve complete clarity, which in turn helped you delve deep inside yourself to pull out emotions from the experiences of your life.
If your character was supposed to cry, you would drop in and bring back memories of when your dog Joe ran away as a child: the emptiness you felt, the tears that streamed down your face, how you felt your world caving in. Then with those feelings still brewing, you would transpose them into your performance onstage or onscreen. It was a technique that the best actors of all time from De Niro to Pacino to Streep studied and utilized, and even though I felt like I was in a cult at first, the more I practiced the better I got.
Just like wrestling.
When I first trained at the Hart Brothers Camp, they had us lie down in the middle of the ring with our knees up in the air and our hands on our chest. Then we would hit the mat simultaneously with our hands and feet hundreds of times. At first I couldn