TNA star Steve Maclin spoke with Fightful on a number of topics, including getting the green light from the company for the vignette.
Maclin said, “When I get the green light from the office after pitching it for so long. It was an idea for this vignette especially, the idea and the origin of it is taking from ‘Apocalypse Now’, when Martin Sheen’s in the hotel room at the beginning of the movie, and he’s him being there and dealing with all his PTSD and having to deal with Vietnam, and I just wanted to take that element and how can we bring this to life, and it was something that I worked with Robert Evans a lot, and we were sitting there just coming up with ideas, and this is something from two years ago that I had an idea for, and it’s funny how things like this work out where here we are in this storyline, me turning babyface, how do I create this sympathetic side of me to get people invested in me this way, open up a little bit more to the fans so you can kind of see my side of life and through me eyes.”
On working with Eric Young:
“Working with [Eric Young] has been awesome with it, especially him just kind of being the mentor that he’s been my entire career that we’ve known each other. I’ve always gone to him for advice. But even for the team that was involved with Eric Tompkins, you had Kevin Martin in the back, Lamp, Robert Peak, who shot everything, who is just a genius with a camera. Please go follow him and follow his work, especially for how he sees things through a lens, it’s just amazing. Everything came together perfectly for this, and I’m very much looking forward to how we can continue to this too.”
On the vignette running over six minutes:
“Yeah, for six and a half minutes, to keep attention on a story, that was the one thing. We weren’t sure if it was gonna get broken up into parts in the episode and kind of go back and forth. Tompkins was the one who’s like, ‘I think to get the raw feel and the grittiness of it and to really get the emotion into it, [it has to] go full length. So to have six and a half minutes of television time, without even wrestling, I was just telling Blake about it earlier, we were catching up, and it’s just crazy to think, that’s probably right now the most TV time I’ll ever have as a character without even wrestling, and being able to just speak my voice, and I really didn’t speak much. It was more the mannerisms and the facials and the way everything was edited, and it just worked out perfectly.”
On the vignette being a testament to how TNA lets talents grow and evolve:
“It’s cool, and it just attests to what TNA does. I love it because it’s a place where you can grow and you can show the world who you are and what your imagination is, and I’m lucky enough that with Ariel and Delirious backstage, having them on creative, and then having Tommy Dreamer there, having Eric Tompkins, who really kind of knew where I was coming from, and he’s the one who edited everything and put it all together, is really cool because he got what vision I have, especially being a vet, and he’s a vet as well, and just trying to show that side and how can be bring this real-life character onto screen and portray it while treading that gray line, if it makes sense, without having to go one way completely or the other because I’ve always never wanted to be the Hacksaw Jim Duggan, Hulk Hogan, pro America, flag-waving. I wanted to bring the real grittiness of how actual vets are represented in the real world, or how I see them, or how I even just feel myself.”
You can check out Maclin’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
