Brodus Clay Talks About Being Bumped From WrestleMania 29, Triple H Praising Him & More

Arda Ocal recently spoke with Brodus Clay. Here are some highlights from the interview.

What’s the perception in the locker room when a wrestler lands a movie role: “Honestly, our locker room is very different than different generations and stuff. Everyone is usually pretty supportive when somebody gets a thing. They usually ask how’s it going and if you like it and stuff, but that’s pretty much as far as it goes. Everyone kind of holds everybody accountable. At the end of the day we’re all guys trying to do the same thing. Our locker room generally gets along pretty good. It’s pretty positive, like, it doesn’t really change. You might get jokes and stuff like oh, movie star, things like that, but it’s pretty positive.”

What he felt when he got bumped off the Wrestlemania card: “I got dressed early. I had new boots, Tensai and I had new gear. We had actually had suits made, tear away suits, like pin stripes, we had like a gangster look. We had a hat for Tensai, which is impossible. The guy’s head is unreal. I had to go to like four different places to get a hat. As a show of team unity I put the face tattoo on like he has. We were ready to go and we were really fired up. I was excited. As each match went down, they’re always on us about time and stuff, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. We were in the Gorilla, we’re getting ready, waiting for the finish of the match and noticing time’s going on a little longer and unfortunately the boss, in a very classy manner, had to stand up and tell us unfortunately we have to cut it due to time. Like I said, at that point, as would anybody be, I was devastated. Upset, a little angry, a little sad, just a lot of things. Like, you work all year for that opportunity and so to have them take it from you is always frustrating.

“I actually was one of the last people to leave. It took me forever to pack my bag, it just took forever. I was on a pretty much empty bus and I was looking at my phone and there was some chants from the crowd saying Brodus got screwed, or something like that. It was a bunch of fans trying to be positive. It was a kind of negative message and I sat on the bus and tweets were pretty negative and stuff like that. I just decided at that moment I got a lot of kids who look at the Funkasaurus and enjoy that stuff so this is an opportunity for me to show everybody that you can take setbacks in life, we all have them, and not just focus on the bad part about it.

“Yes, I was hurt. Yes, I was setback or whatever, but we’re going to take it and we’re going to use it and learn from that experience and build on it. So that’s what the whole process has been with #365 It’s just been more and more fans have shared their stories and I didn’t expect that at all. It’s been everything from they want to lose weight to they want to fix their job to be a better parent or be a better son or daughter or finish their education. So it’s been a lot of different things. I think we’re in day 72 or 73 today and it’s been a pretty crazy process in terms of, I learn about the fans and get a better understanding of what they want from me and what they get out of the stuff that we do. Sometimes we lose sight that some people do look forward to us coming out there every week and make them laugh and not think so much about the other things that are going on in life.”

Did he get praise from management for the way he handled the situation: “Triple H, he’s a man’s man. He came up to me and shook my hand and said it took a lot of guts to handle things that way. Across the board, other wrestlers came up to me and same thing. Everyone was pretty positive.”