During a recent appearance with Bert Kreischer, WWE star Becky Lynch opened up about her unexpected background in Clown studies, revealing that she immersed herself in physical theater during her college years before recommitting to wrestling.
Lynch explained that she studied Clown at Columbia College, focusing on the physical expression and mask work that the discipline requires. “Well, I studied Clown. Yeah. In Columbia. I studied Clown. More just, yeah, the nose and the embodiment of the Clown. Just the mask work,” she said.
The former world champion revealed that she originally walked away from wrestling at just 19 years old, believing there was no realistic path for the kind of performer she wanted to become. At the time, WWE’s women’s division featured matches and presentations that didn’t align with her goals or her identity as a wrestler.
“I’d given up wrestling at the age of 19 because I felt like what I wanted to do wasn’t going to be possible,” Lynch admitted. “You know, I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to wrestle, and I didn’t see an outlet for it in the mainstream. So I had left home at 18. I was living in Canada. I was wrestling over there. I was wrestling in Japan. I was coming to America. I was wrestling here. But WWE was very much models, and it was pillow fights, it was mud wrestling matches, it was all the stuff that I didn’t want to do, nobody would want to see me do.”
Lynch added that even her mother struggled to watch the women’s product of that era, making it even harder to envision a future in the business. “My mom was like, ‘What’s your plan? What are you doing?’ And I couldn’t point to anything and say, ‘This is… this is what I’m going to do.’ If I pointed at WWE anytime when she came in and she’d see what the women were doing, she’d avert her eyes and walk out like, ‘Oh, God, what is this?’”
After stepping away from wrestling, Lynch returned to school to pursue acting, eventually discovering physical theater and the emotional vulnerability of Clown work. She shared a story about the moment the discipline first clicked for her.
“I went back to college and I did my degree in acting, and I went to Columbia College. And then at the end of the semester I was in physical theater, and this teacher, this little Italian woman, brings in the Clown nose,” Lynch recalled. “And everybody just stood up there, and she wouldn’t let you do anything, and you just had to stand there, and like everybody just started crying. And I was like, ‘What is this? What is this thing?’ And so then I became fascinated with it, and I ended up doing my thesis on it. On Clown— On how Clown can bring out a truthful performance. I loved it.”
