John Morrison on Life After WWE, Hollywood and Why He Belongs in the Main Event

Fred: I’m joined by a very special guest. He’s the Shaman of Sexy, the Monday Night Delight, the Friday Night Delight, and he’s got more nicknames than he’s won titles. He’s John Hennigan, aka former WWE superstar John Morrison. John, thanks so much for joining us on this late night on the East Coast. How you doing, man?

John Morrison: Doing good, man. I’m at the office here in sunny Los Angeles, trying to get a little work done. I hit the gym earlier, and I’m working on producing “Boone the Bounty Hunter.” I would correct your introduction in two ways: A, I’d pronounce it “Shaman,” and B, if you count the titles I’ve won in independent wrestling federations, I might now have more titles than nicknames. That one’s a toss-up.

Fred: That’s right, you’re the current FWE champion. You left WWE on good terms, and you mentioned you wanted to get better on promos. It’s been a couple of years since you were on that big stage of professional wrestling. Why have you been away so long, and when can we expect you back, if we can expect you back?

John Morrison: That’s the million-dollar question. Yes, I did leave on good terms. Triple H, Stephanie, Mark Carrano, Vince and I all text each other happy faces on our birthdays, so definitely good terms, and the door is open. I’m looking forward to getting back to professional wrestling. It’s one of the things I fell in love with early in life. Like all the other Hulkamaniacs out there, I was a big fan of Hogan, the Warrior and Macho Man growing up. But I also loved movies. I was a big fan of Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan and kung fu movies, and that’s what I’ve been working on since I’ve been gone: my acting and stunt fighting, and lately, producing out of this office, which has been really fun and eye-opening. I’m learning a lot about how things work behind the scenes in Hollywood and entertainment in general, and I’d put wrestling in that category. Never say never, and never believe it until it actually happens. One thing I’ve liked a lot about not being with WWE is having the autonomy to do what I want with my time and the creative freedom to pursue my own projects.

Fred: You’re spectacular in the ring, but you take some crazy bumps. How’s your body feeling, not wrestling full time?

John Morrison: Amazing. Well, I tweaked my back last week doing vortexes, which is a crazy parkour flip. Whether I’m wrestling or training for fighting or stunts, I somehow always find a way to beat myself up. It’s just the way I’m wired. I like being physical and working hard in the gym, and whatever kind of training I’m doing, I like going really hard. It’s always going to be a big part of my life.

Fred: You’re a good-looking guy. Growing up, did people ever tell you to stick to acting or modeling, or was wrestling always the first career path?

John Morrison: I think I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t one of the guys in intermediate school and high school who all the girls were fawning over. I didn’t hear how beautiful I was every day like I do now from you, Fred. Acting was something I was interested in, and I took some acting classes when I was younger. In high school, I got into collegiate-style wrestling. I was the team captain my junior and senior years, and I wrestled at UC Davis. Then I realized a blend of performance and physicality was what I was interested in. At the time, I really wanted to do action acting, the kind of stuff Jackie Chan did. He was my hero. I slowly realized professional wrestling was even closer to what I wanted, because it was my first love as a kid, watching all these guys do crazy moves. The theatrics of pro wrestling encompassed everything I thought was cool, and I still do. It’s been really fun to have the opportunity to do that and some of the action acting I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.

Fred: I saw a picture floating around the internet of you and Roy “Big Country” Nelson of the UFC in togas. Were you guys just having a random toga party?

John Morrison: It’s LA. Toga parties every week. It’s crazy out here. That was a promo piece for the animated series “Black Dynamite.” The two of us basically got our asses kicked by a mannequin of Michael Jai White. Roy was a great guy, and we had a lot of fun that day. I’ll have to say what’s up to him when I get out to Vegas in a couple of weeks.

Fred: Are you an MMA fan? Do you think MMA has hurt the appeal of pro wrestling, or are they more different than people think?

John Morrison: I’m first and foremost a fan of movies, but MMA, definitely. I do think it has hurt the appeal of professional wrestling. When I was a kid watching TV, I thought, “That’s wrestling. That’s what I want to do when I grow up,” and there was no other option. It’s like in the ’50s, when there were only three shows on TV and half the nation watched “I Love Lucy” because there was nothing else on. Now there’s another combat sport where two gladiators, so to speak, fight in an octagon or a ring, and it’s dividing the audience.

Fred: Do you think there are too many shows on TV? Every week you’ve got a UFC event on TV, and WWE has Main Event, SmackDown and Raw. Everywhere you look, there’s WWE and UFC. Does that hurt them in the long run, or does it help their bottom line?

John Morrison: It’s hard to say. I heard a crazy statistic a few weeks ago, something like 900 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and it’s probably even more now. With all the content out there for pro wrestling and MMA, the pay-per-views and the three-hour Raw, I know people are competing for market share and ad revenue, and the more airtime you have, the more ad revenue you can sell. But at some point, you have to balance quantity with quality and find that sweet spot. An economist would call it supply and demand, brother, and right now supply is a little higher than demand, in my opinion.

Fred: As an athlete, did you feel spread too thin in the years when they had maybe 14 pay-per-views instead of 12?

John Morrison: As far as being overexposed as the character of John Morrison, at times, yes, but that’s because sometimes the storylines created for me weren’t as well thought out as others, which is fine. That’s how business goes. You don’t have time to fully think out a storyline for every character on the card, so you start at the top and work your way down. As an athlete, doing 200 shows a year, it was hard to have time to do anything but pro wrestling. It would have been nice to have a week off, a few weeks off or an offseason. Wrestling is pretty much the only sport that doesn’t have an offseason, and I think it would be nice for a lot of the guys to recharge their batteries and spend time with family and friends.

Fred: What’s your schedule like right now?

John Morrison: Crazy. Like I said, I find ways to beat the crap out of myself nonstop and keep myself busy. I wrestled for FWE in Brooklyn on Saturday. Since I got back, I’ve usually been training in the morning for about four hours, a combo of weight training and some kind of stunt fighting, parkour or martial arts. Then I hit the office for meetings. If you want to make it in LA, take a meeting. I’m looking for directors and people for “Boone the Bounty Hunter,” doing interviews like this to promote myself and Out of Your Mind Fitness, and writing. I’m putting in 12-hour days and wrestling on the weekends, but it’s what I choose to do with my time.

Fred: Even in 2013, did you have to overcome a stigma about being a pro wrestler? For whatever reason, certain casting directors don’t look at pro wrestlers the same way, even though you guys are pretty damn good actors.

John Morrison: Pro wrestlers are great entertainers. What I’ve found is that in a live show at Madison Square Garden or the Staples Center, you’re on a small stage in front of 20,000 people, and you have to be really big and really emote so people can feel you. With a camera, the camera comes in and gets it, so you don’t have to be big. You have to have the thoughts and intent in your mind, but make everything smaller. As for a stigma with casting directors, sometimes, yes, but a lot of times a wrestler walks into an audition against somebody who’s been acting for eight or 10 years. You’ve got entertainment experience but not necessarily the acting training. I think it’s a very similar skill set you can build up. A lot of times when I leave rooms, the casting director will say, “I’m really impressed. You’ve been studying, and you’ve been taking this seriously.” If you apply yourself to acting the same way you applied yourself to whatever you were successful in, wrestling, fighting or basketball, you’ll end up being successful in that, too.

Fred: You’re pretty damn successful at keeping your body in shape, and you’re involved with Out of Your Mind Fitness. How did you get involved with them?

John Morrison: Out of Your Mind Fitness is me, and I’ve been involved with myself for a very long time. Let me tell you, it’s amazing. I started OYM Fitness in 2010 with a buddy of mine, Jeff Carrier. I’d wanted to do a fitness project for a long time. I talked to WWE about writing a fitness book, and they said no, because a previous fitness book hadn’t sold very well. Then I approached them about a fitness DVD, and they said they didn’t have the resources to devote to it, but I was free to do it on my own. Jeff and I had become friends. He was training Melina, which is how we met, and he had ideas very similar to mine. We came up with basically a virtual personal trainer, a complete functional training regimen from Level 1 through Level 5 that takes the place of a personal trainer at the gym. It breaks everything down, with all your set, rep and rest info programmed in a training log, so you watch the video, take the log to the gym and you’re good to go. If you have an iPhone, we have an app with the set, rep and rest info and short tutorial videos for each exercise, a personal trainer in the palm of your hand, which is what we originally intended.

Fred: You mentioned that on the road with WWE, you didn’t have a lot of time for other opportunities. Is there one missed opportunity you look back on and say, “I could have taken that if I wasn’t on the road”?

John Morrison: More than any one specific missed opportunity, it’s the amount of time. When you’re on the WWE train, brother, you’re flying past exits and don’t even have time to see what you’re missing, and nine years go by. You’re a pro wrestler. That’s who you are and what you know. Luckily, I’m really happy with my career, my choices and how everything worked out, so there’s not really one specific opportunity. I wish I could have spent more time in all those awesome cities I visited traveling around the world with WWE, a few extra days in Rome, Milan, Tokyo or Sydney seeing the sights. And if I’d started training stunt fighting earlier, I would have had a quicker learning curve. But I really have nothing to complain about. I’m happy with where I’m at.

Fred: A lot of people are surprised you never rose to full-time main event status, aside from that brief period with the ECW title. Your name always gets lost in the shuffle when people talk about guys who had great matches. For a few years, you were having kick-ass matches with Punk, you got in the ring with Triple H, and you had an awesome pay-per-view-quality match with Rey Mysterio for the Intercontinental title. It always looked like you were on the cusp of the world title level. Is there a particular reason it didn’t pan out?

John Morrison: You can say it didn’t work out or blame other people, but I think it’s a couple of things. One, I never cut that really memorable promo on TV, like Austin 3:16 or the promo where Punk sat cross-legged on top of the ramp and cut the shoot promo on the business, something that really set people apart. It’s not that I couldn’t cut a great promo or that all my promos sucked. I had some bad ones and some good ones, but I never had that one super-memorable promo moment. I had a lot of really great matches. And six or eight months before I left, I had a broken vertebra in my neck and neck surgery. It affected how I felt, and I couldn’t move my arm very well. I came back early and started questioning how I was feeling physically. If that injury hadn’t happened and I’d kept along the trajectory I was on, I think I would have ended up doing main events. In retrospect, I don’t think I’d have done anything differently. I feel great now, and I feel like I have a lot more to offer than I did when I was there. When I get back, they’d be stupid not to put me in the main event, because that’s where I deserve to be. At the time, maybe I didn’t deserve to be there, but I feel pretty solid about my skill set now. The fact that I was never WWE Champion or World Heavyweight Champion might actually be a good thing, because it’s a reason for me to come back, and winning one of those titles would mean the world to me. Hopefully fans can see that, and it’ll mean just as much to them.

Fred: That’s a refreshing outlook, because more often than not, guys aren’t candid about themselves. Is that the hardest thing for an entertainer, being self-critical in a way that’s still constructive?

John Morrison: It’s sometimes hard to be critical of yourself, but as an entertainer in front of the camera or as a wrestler, it’s really important to be self-critical in a constructive way and stay positive. It’s all about taking where you’re at, making tweaks and getting better and better over time. The day you think you’re perfect, or that you had your perfect match, or that you’ve got nothing else to learn, is the day you stop improving, the day you get stale and the day you start blaming other people for your failure.

Fred: Ready for some quick hits from the fans? Somebody on Twitter asks: “What is your favorite WWE moment, and what’s your worst?”

John Morrison: I have several favorites. Winning the WWE Tag Team Championship for the first time with MNM, me, Joey Mercury and Melina, beating Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio at MSG in our first-ever match on SmackDown, was pretty damn cool. Beating Rey Mysterio in Cleveland in 2009 for the IC title was huge. I think that was my defining moment as a babyface. Wrestling Punk in Cincinnati when he beat me for the ECW title was the first time it felt like everything clicked on all cylinders for me as a heel. Then there were Jeff Hardy in Baltimore, Dolph Ziggler, any match on my last Europe tour with Raw, the ladder match against Sheamus for the No. 1 contender spot, wrestling Miz in the falls count anywhere match and winning a Slammy for “The Dirt Sheet.” It’s hard to pick just one. As for the worst, I try not to remember the negative and just go with the positive, so I can’t really think of any bad moments. There are things I might have changed along the way, but nothing that sticks out as the worst moment of my career.

Fred: Terry Allen asks: “Starship Pain is an awesome move. Did you invent it?”

John Morrison: I did. I’d seen people do split-legged moonsaults and split-legged sentons, and guys like Jimmy Yang do a corkscrew moonsault off the top. I did a corkscrew moonsault off the top in OVW as my finisher for a while, and eventually I decided to try putting the two together. I did it at OVW a couple of times, left it in the bag of tricks and pulled it out against CM Punk in 2007. As far as being the first person to do it, I doubt it. It’s a split-legged corkscrew moonsault, and I’m sure someone, somewhere along the way, had done it, but I’d never seen anyone do it before I did, and I was pretty stoked when I figured out I could actually do it physically.

Fred: We’re getting a lot of people asking this: Has TNA ever approached you?

John Morrison: Yeah. Wrestling is a business, and TNA is like a really cool startup company. I’ve talked to several people in their organization, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about what they have to say. It’s business, brother. If they’ve got some cool ideas, of course I’m going to hear what they have to say.

Fred: Chris asks: “Favorite WrestleMania moment?”

John Morrison: Probably the moonsault off the ladder in the Money in the Bank match at WrestleMania in Orlando. I was really stoked that worked out without killing myself or anybody else.

Fred: Has WWE Studios ever approached you to do a film? They picked Brodus Clay over you for “No One Lives.”

John Morrison: They haven’t. I haven’t seen “No One Lives,” but I’d venture a guess that Brodus Clay was probably a better choice than me for that role. I really like Brodus. I heard he kills some people, and it’s a good movie for him.

Fred: Thoughts on your old tag team partner The Miz, who has unfortunately regressed these last couple of years?

John Morrison: It’s kind of too bad. One thing I’ll say about a WWE superstar, a hero or somebody people can really invest in, is that the person should emphatically be themselves. You should be able to envision that person in any situation, inside the ring or outside it, and they should react like themselves every time. That’s The Miz all day. He’s annoying sometimes in the car when he’s rapping and singing, but so am I. He was just himself, he really raised the level of his wrestling, and it crescendoed when he main-evented WrestleMania. As far as his fall since then, part of it might be storyline stuff, part of it might be that he just needs a good tag team partner to carry him, and part of it might be how the business works. You’re on top for a while, then you cycle down the card until you cycle back up. Who knows? Maybe two years from now he’ll be main-eventing WrestleMania, or maybe he’ll be main-eventing NXT.

Fred: I was at PWS on WrestleMania weekend when you wrestled Liger in that kick-ass match. Is there anybody else left on your bucket list?

John Morrison: This will probably never happen now, but HBK was on my bucket list. I would have loved to have a great one-on-one singles match with him. I got to wrestle him in a tag match and do some stuff with him in six-mans and Survivor Series-type matches, but he was definitely on my bucket list.

Fred: What advice can you give people who want to break into entertainment and professional wrestling?

John Morrison: Like I said about The Miz, you have to emphatically be yourself. Understand who you are and your point of view. Two, whatever you’re doing right now, get really good at it. And three, start working out. If you’re going to be a wrestler, you have to be able to move and perform like an athlete, so treat yourself like an athlete.

Fred: One more bonus question, only because it’s worded so uniquely. Patricia Brown asks: “Johnny, are you and Melina still BFF4L?” I’m assuming that means best friends for life.

John Morrison: That’s a great question to end on. I’ll always care about her, and I hope she’ll always care about me, too.

Fred: Very well said. Fans can find you online on Twitter and at OYMFitness.com. Any projects on the horizon?

John Morrison: Indubitably. You should check out “Boone the Bounty Hunter.” The IMDb page is up already. It’s a movie about a narcissistic bounty hunter who does parkour to catch bounties, and it’s the first movie I’m producing. I just got attached to a movie called “Minutes to Midnight,” and there’s always other stuff in the works. Maybe next year “Ghost Puncher” will be out there for you to check out, too.

Fred: You’ve got a nice, updated IMDb page with your headshot. Still got the beard going. John, thank you so much, man.

John Morrison: I’m trying to do this acting thing, brother. You’ve got to have a headshot. Fun time. Take care.