The Miz On What He Did After MTV’s Road Rules To Get WWE’s Attention
The Miz will go one-on-one with the Rated R Superstar, Edge, at WWE Day 1 on January 1, 2022. Before stepping into the ring with the WWE Hall of Famer, The Miz joined Freddie Prinze Jr. on his Wrestling with Freddie podcast.
The Miz revealed during the podcast that he specifically prepared himself for life in WWE by learning to create his own merchandise and even went to improv acting schools.
"I've told this story a million times, it's a true story," The Miz explained. "I was looking in the mirror and I was like 'what do you want to do with your life?' and I'll never forget, there was like a Rock action figure that my casts mates on the Real World gave me on my show. I looked at that and I said 'I'm going to be a WWE Superstar.' I went over to my computer and looked up on Google or Yahoo and looked up independent wrestling schools where I could learn.
"There was Ohio Valley Wrestling, at the time, and there was UPW and UPW was in California, in Los Angeles. I was like 'alright I'm going to L.A!' So I moved out to L.A, I paid $2500 just to go to wrestling classes and then I believe every month it was like $400 for acting classes with a guy named Steven Anderson. I got into an acting class with him and I also went to Improv Olympics, as well as Groundlings.
"I tried to find all the tools you could possibly have, like, wrestling is professional wrestling, the art of wrestling. Yes, it's in a ring, but it is also acting, it is also improv, it is also all these things. By the way, while I was doing The Real World and the challenges, making a name for myself I was making shirts. I saw that merchandise in WWE was a big thing and if I can sell merchandise then maybe WWE would come knocking.
"It took like three years of that, but not only that, and also to make money I was doing The Challenge, but you didn't make a lot of money off doing that unless you won. So, I would go to colleges, and colleges would hire me because Real World was so much like being in a college, that colleges would hire me to do motivational speaking, and what does WWE do? You speak in front of large audiences. So I got to practice speaking in front of a large audience all the time, and so I had all these different things."
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Wrestling with Freddie with an h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.