Steve Austin Fancast.com Article

Source: Fancast.com

Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Hmm, such is not the case when NBC’s ‘Chuck’ gets hit with two nasty blasts from the past this Monday at 8/7c.

Not only does a plot twist deposit Sarah’s high school nemesis turned enemy spy, Heather Chandler (played by Nicole Richie), back in her life, beefy bruiser Hugo Panzer returns to torment Chuck (Zachary Levi).

Former wrestling superstar Steve Austin first guested as Hugo in January, when the Ring goon and Chuck engaged in an airplane cargo area throwdown. Panzer had his pants kicked then, but now he’s back for “more mischief,” Austin tells Fancast. “Revenge seems to be his M.O., and this time he thinks he’s going to kill Chuck.”

Having ruled the wrestling ring under his “Ringmaster,” “Rattlesnake” and “Stone Cold” monikers for many a year, Austin says that on ‘Chuck’ he’ll occasionally “put my two cents in” when it comes to plotting punches. “But they’ve got some pretty great stunt people on that show,” he notes, “so I pretty much just leave it to the experts.”

Expendables,’ we asked Austin about being a part of one of this summer’s biggest big-screen hits. He says that he was home in Texas when the action flick’s literally and figuratively beefy cast started coming together. Once back in L.A., he took a meeting with writer-director-star Sylvester Stallone, and they hit it off.

“I learned a lot working with that guy,” Austin shares. “He is smart, always thinking and reading about this, that, whatever. And that impressed me.”

Meanwhile, Eric Roberts, with whom he shared most his scenes, “is so damn funny,” Austin reports. “We’d sit around and laugh our asses off.”

One arena you won’t see Austin gracing any time soon is his original stomping ground. Though the WWE’s ‘Raw’ series teased his return (by playing ‘Stone Cold’s theme music) at an August match, Austin has no plans at this time to reenter that world.

“I love that company and I loved my career in the WWE, but the climate has changed,” the six-time world champion laments. “I was a very edgy act, and I enjoyed being that edgy act, so to have to rein it in and not go into my well of tricks or words…. It’s all so different now.”

Raised in South Texas, Austin says he grew up watching Houston Wrestling at the Houston Coliseum, where the legendary Paul Boesch was the promoter and the arena was filled with smoke and only the dimmest of lighting around the ring.

“I fell in love with the business, and god dang, it’s changed so much,” he notes. The WWE is now “sports entertainment – the business has come out of the closet, so to speak – and like football, it’s gotten faster. I remember back in the mid-’80s when I would watch the NWA (National Wrestling Alliance) and the TV matches would last forever. These days it’s bing-bang-boom, commercial break, you come back hot-n-heavy, and then all of a sudden the match is over.”

Austin prefers a time when “it wasn’t such a hurried pace,” when pro wrestling would plot and present protracted storylines rife with on- and off-the-mat rivalries, feuds and ever-changing alliances.

“It’s hard to tell those kinds of stories anymore,” he says. “I liked it when it was a little slower-paced.”

Steve Austin InterviewMagazine.com Article

Back in Action
By Alexander Howard
Source: InterviewMagazine.com

"Working with [director] Sly Stallone was one of the best experiences of my life," says Steve Austin, one of the starts of The Expendables, and who most will remember for his sneering caricature as a celebrity of the professional wrestling ring. When he's not mocking you, you know something significant has happened "It was very competitive among the guys; really brutal and really realistic."

At the movie's meaty center is Steve Austin as the down and dirty bodyguard appropriately dubbed Paine. Austin clinches the climax of the movie with two sequences with Stallone and his UFC counterpart Randy Couture. "The first time around [with Stallone], there was too much finesse, so we just decided to make it brutal." But brutality has its costs, and when butting heads with this particular director, the cost can be high: "I must have had a goose egg on my forehead and ended up giving Sly a few stitches. He was cool about it and only told me to bring it even harder!" For the rest of film, Austin gets certifiably ruthless with Stallone and his crew of mercenaries (including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Randy Couture). But there is more to the 6'2, 250-lb former WWE superstar than meets the eye.

For instance, few would imagine that the teenager who would become one of the most recognizable faces in entertainment planned on becoming... an insurance salesman. "Well, my father was an in-surance man," Austin emphasizes with a South Texan drawl. "So I went to junior college on my football scholarship and studied accounting—although I grew tired of that pretty quick and switched my major to P.E." Austin burned out and left college with just 17 hours left on his degree, and wound up working his way to a top-pay forklift job as a dock worker. "The bosses at the company I was working for wanted me to become a terminal manager, but I knew it wasn't really for me. And then one night, this commercial came across the TV for a professional wrestling school, so I enrolled and got the shit kicked out of me , day one." Though he wasn't exactly following in his father's footsteps, Austin's parents supported him through the early days.

The way to the top was (unsurprisingly) tough: "Monday night was Memphis," Austin rattles off matter-of-factly about his early days on the local Tennessee circuit. "Tuesday was Louisville, Wednesday was Indiana, spot show on Thursday, and then we'd drive through the night to Dallas for Friday just to come back Saturday to film Memphis TV and do Nashville that same night." After years of working the same rooms, week-in and week-out, and living off uncooked potatoes, Austin eventually became a national superstar in the WWE. Still then, there was more to fight: "At one of the few matches my mom came to see, I was wrestling with a Staph infection that had taken hold in my right elbow, and I had to do a Pay-Per-View event later that week. Seeing me so sick wasn't a great memory for her." The cumulative effects of a long, injury-filled career eventually brought Austin out of the ring and into acting, where he's been happy to tap into his slightly less brutal side.

So what exactly makes Steve Austin tick? He's still an animal in peak physical condition, but his favorite days now are spent motoring around his Texas ranch with his chocolate lab Hershey. Bud Light is still his favorite beer (Austin was renown for his tendencies to drench himself and his vanquished opponents in the suds after a match), but now he favors the subtle complexities of a Cliff Lede cabernet. "I guess I was born with the drive," he says. "I just always wanted to be successful at what I did, and at whatever you want to do, you have to bust your ass and do it a hundred percent." Even if you think pro wrestling is fake, his success is pretty real.

USAToday.com Steve Austin Article

Source: USAToday.com
By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY

Steve Austin is quite the character — and has been a number of them over the years.

His antiheroic "Stone Cold" pro wrestling persona was a hit with fans in the late 1990s. That led to him playing mean hombres in action movies such as The Expendables, in theaters Friday.

But off screen, Austin's personality is more laugh-out-loud than rough-and-tumble, says the 45-year-old grappler-turned-thespian. "Believe me, if we hung around all day, you'd laugh your (butt) off. I believe in my comedic timing more than I do in my tough-guy abilities, trust me."

He's bad-guy bodyguard Dan Paine in The Expendables, a thorn in the side of the heroes of director, writer and star Sylvester Stallone's action film. For a guy who tussled with "The Rock" way before he was Hollywood's Dwayne Johnson, having a face-to-face with the likes of Stallone was a dream come true.

"I'd never met Sly in my life, but I'm a huge fan, and I've seen probably every movie he's done and grew up watching him," Austin says.

"It was an easy meeting — it was like I've known the guy for 10 years. He offered me the job on the spot, and I accepted it on the spot."

Stallone sustained a hairline fracture in his neck while filming a sequence with Austin, and he made sure to bring that up during the Expendables panel at Comic-Con last month.

"I love this guy," Stallone says. "He broke my neck. He snapped it, (but) it was my fault. I now have this little thing with three screws. People say, 'Don't get screwed,' and I'm like, 'I already have. Three times.' "

And Austin and co-star Eric Roberts bonded the first day on set in Rio de Janeiro when they had to jump through a large fireball. "For two heterosexual men, we all but held hands all day every day," Roberts reports.

A native Texan, Austin wrestled professionally for 15 years, living out of a suitcase and seeing the world one packed arena at a time. He reached the top of that food chain with his foul-mouthed, middle-finger-flipping "Stone Cold" character. He retired in 2004 when wrestling started to take too much of a toll on his body.

"And I did nothing for three to four years. I just hunted and fished a lot," says Austin, who owns a 2,100-acre ranch 90 miles south of San Antonio. "Then I said: 'You know what? I'm bored, and I'm way too young to not be productive.' "

Austin had enjoyed guest-starring with Don Johnson on Nash Bridges back in its late-'90s heyday. So he decided to move to Los Angeles with his three dogs, Hershey, Shona and Brio, to give acting a shot.

Roberts, whom Austin considers a mentor and friend, says the burly actor will do well in show business because he's witty.

"You never think that by looking at him because he looks like a monster, actually," Roberts says. "But he's not. He's a total sweetie-pie. I just love him like I love family."

Austin is starting to work out his acting muscles more these days. He's filming the family drama The Boxer and the Kid, about a former pugilist who takes a bullied kid under his wing, and he returns this week to the set of NBC's Chuck to film scenes for an episode to air Oct. 4. He is looking to do a Western soon, too; he's a longtime fan of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

He also yearns to do a comedy because, at his core, he's a funny guy. This is a man who, after all, hit his boss in the head with a bedpan in his wrestling days.

"I don't really care what I do. As long as I'm happy doing it and I'm making good stuff people want to see, I'm cool."

Steve Austin USAWeekend.com Interview

Sure, he beat up people for 15 years as a professional wrestler — and starting this weekend, he can be seen throwing down with Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables —but Steve Austin is a caring kind of guy who loves his dogs, a pair of labs named Hershey and Shona. And he felt bad he couldn’t take them along with him when he filmed The Expendables in the sightseeing-friendly locations of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans.

"Hershey didn’t get a chance to come. I’m telling you, the next time I go to Louisiana to shoot a movie, I’m taking her," says the man formerly known as "Stone Cold." He may not be showing up weekly on TV as a World Wrestling Entertainment superstar, but Austin is staying busy with his acting — he’s currently filming the drama The Boxer and the Kid, as well as stopping by the set of NBC’s Chuck to shoot an episode next week — and entertaining thousands of his fans via his lively Twitter feed.

We caught up with Austin to talk about The Expendables as well as how he’s doing in his second career:

The Expendables took you to some interesting places. Do you still enjoy traveling in your post-wrestling career?

The traveling these days, it is what it is to get to a job. Back in the day, when I wrestled professionally for 15 years, my life was on the road and I lived out of a suitcase. Even when I came home, I would open my suitcase, lay it on the floor and would basically live out of that and wear the same stuff over and over again. I’d wash it and put it back there because there was never any sense in unpacking. You always were on the road. Now, I don’t go on vacation to any crazy destination. I want to go to South Texas to my ranch. I don’t really look forward to traveling anymore just for pleasure. As long as it’s for business, I’m cool with doing it because it goes with the territory. But I don’t travel for leisure at all, just because I spent my life doing that.

You've got an intense fight scene with Sly in The Expendables. Do you ever read the script of an action movie, see some sequence and go, "Whoa, not doing that…"?

No, not really. I’m not extremely dialogue-heavy in this movie by any stretch. Eric Roberts is my boss in the movie — I’m like his right-hand guy and intimidation factor. I knew exactly what this part was going into it, and Sly beefed it up a little bit. I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. At the end of the day, I wanted to make a movie with Sly and the other guys as well, and we had a great time. It was a great opportunity for me to make a movie with a guy that I always looked up to.

That must be cool as an actor - and a dude - to be in such company alongside Jason Statham, Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren, among others in the male-heavy cast.

It is. I come from the world of pro wrestling and that’s behind me now. That’s the biggest body of my work and what I’m known for right now. In that job and what I chose to do, I was at the highest of the food chain that you could get. But now, to try to start over and turn into the best actor as I can get; to hang out and watch Sly the way he conducted his business, from the fact that he wrote this movie, he directed it, he’s starring in it with all the other guys who are in there; and being able to sit there and talk shop with Mickey Rourke for 45 minutes, it was just a lot of fun. This is the kind of experience that a guy like me would kill to be a part of.

Since you started, what part of your acting has improved the most?

It’s just being able to be settled in and not nervous. I’m starting to really get a sense of what it takes to prepare for a role. I’m starting now to really relax a little bit more in dialogue scenes in some of the independent movies I’ve done. I’ve got a long ways to go, but I’ve always been a big believer that on-the-job training and experience and repetition are the key things to get better in anything you do. To me, it’s hanging out and working with people who are better than you and more experienced than you. Every one of my scenes was with Eric Roberts. We became great friends, we still trade phone calls to this day, and as far as just hanging out with a guy and asking a bunch of acting questions, Eric Roberts is pretty damn high up there on my list. The fact that he was so cool to me and took me under his wing was absolutely wonderful.

Was that ever intimidating for you, to start a whole new career after reaching the pinnacle of your previous profession?

No, I didn’t get nervous or put pressure on myself because if it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out. I’d just move on to the next thing and go do something else. I wanted something that was going to be as challenging to me mentally and physically, and acting is. It’s a tremendous challenge, I’m learning every day, and that’s what I enjoy about it. It’s just like everything I’ve always done: I’m going to go out there and try my best and do the best I could. Whatever the best I can do is the best I can do. When I was doing high school athletics and everything, my parents never pushed me like crazy. They just supported me. I believe in anything you do, you just do the best you can, and if you’re not going to do the best you can, don’t do it.

It also seems like you're having a lot of fun.

I am. In the wrestling business, for years it was a fun life, but in the ring you didn’t know you could have fun. And then after you’re experienced enough, you can have fun. That’s one of the keys to loosening up and being a better actor is having fun with it. Being serious at the same time, but as I learn more, about how to be comfortable being another character. I was really successful at being Stone Cold. I’m not trying to be that in every part I have.

You Twitter a lot. How much have you embraced technology? Do you have the latest iPhone, a computer, etc.?

I don’t have the big computer setup, but I’ve got everything at my ranch and in my place in LA. I don’t have the latest, greatest iPhone – I’ve got the next one down. I’m doing a lot better than I was. [Laughs] I’m starting to pick up on things. Everybody’s doing it, so you might as well get in the game at some point.

Interacting with fans, does that hone your comedy a bit?

When I started doing the Twitter thing, man, I was so anti-technology, but I’ve learned to embrace the Twitter thing. I would get on there and just make these ludicrous workouts and they would turn into one story after the other about me fighting sharks and whatnot. And people would think that I was drunk or whatever, which I was not. Tweeting out the most ludicrous things and the funny stuff I like to say are just ways for me to entertain myself and a way for me to stay in touch with my core fan base. When you leave the machine of what is the WWE, you have no way to reach out and talk to those people and communicate with them. Believe me, with my largest body of work coming from the world of professional wrestling, I know why I’ve gotten the roles that I’ve gotten. It’s not because I’m Marlon Brando. I do think I am bringing something to the screen now and learning to bring more, but I love my pro wrestling fans and I always want to stay in touch with them. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have been anybody or had a career.