Hey boys and girls, we had the most fun chatting with The Funkasaurus himself, World Wrestling Entertainment’s Brodus Clay.  Brodus makes his film debut in the horror fest, No One Lives. Dig in to read about head staples, giving birth to giant English babies, our mutual love of Godzilla, and Brodus' amazing Twitter positivity project, #365toRedemption.

Somebody Call My Momma

 

No One Lives

Brodus Clay

 

 

The Lady Miz Diva: What brought you to No One Lives?

Brodus Clay:  Extreme Rules; I was with Alberto del Rio and we were going against Christian and Christian won the world heavyweight championship, and as a result, I got a ladder shot to the head that busted me wide open.  I had 13 staples in my head.  So, I was gonna be on the shelf for a couple of weeks while I healed up and I wasn’t happy about it.  I was down stretching, being grumpy in the ring, and John Laurinaitis, who was our talent guy at the time, came down and he was like, “Hey there’s a movie project.”  I was like, “Yes!”  “I didn’t finish telling you, yet.”  I said, “I’ll do it.”  “Do you want to know what it is?”  “No, I’m in. They’ll have a script, right?  I’ll check it out”  “Alright, cool.  Casting’s in LA.  I’ll give you the information in a couple of weeks.”  So, I get to the audition. I didn’t know that casting meant they dip you in prosthetics rubber and plastic to make another me - a body double - for some scenes in the movie.  So I said, “I got it,” and at the time, I had a big beard and the guy handed me a razor and he’s like, “You can’t have any hair when we dip you.”  I was like, “One razor? What am I gonna do with that?”  So they made this giant cast of me and I ended up having a twin, but the twin had a dead look on his face and I was sitting in makeup sometimes and I’d see it across the chair and I’d be, “Can we cover him up?”

 

LMD:  I wasn’t sure what was happening during that scene, if there were going to be zombies…

BC:  No, I’m just having a baby; a giant English baby.

 

LMD:  It’s a backwards Alien.

BC:  Yeah, it is.  He didn’t come through my chest, he came through my back.  It wasn’t so much that he killed me.  I get it.  I mean, he killed me like three times.  He just killing me.  At one point, I was just like, ‘Bro, I didn’t even kill that girl. You saw her, she wanted to go. I was playing.’ He should’ve been mad at her, not Ethan.  Ethan didn’t cut her throat; he was just messing around, working on his catchphrase.  But unfortunately, he didn’t take it that way and he beat me down. There were some signs I could have got out of that, like when he took the knife from me - I should’ve left.  When a guy take a knife from you and hands it back to you, you should leave.

 

LMD:  Well, there’s a few moments like that that are so weird and twisted I wondered if it wasn’t taking place in Emma’s head?  What was your take on the movie when you read it?

BC:  You know, the one thing I liked about that movie was that it told a story, but I think that sometimes with movies, you get too much information.  It doesn’t leave much for the imagination. So you put pieces together; they give something about how it all came together.  Like the one thing with the girls who each had the body scars because he kept trackers in them; so at the end you realise that the first girl was a hostage, too, she just gave in, where the other one was strong at the end.  I think for me this was a different story because you either have the reluctant hero who either doesn’t want to be a hero, but he does it.  This guy’s not a hero.  He is a cold-blooded killer, and he is killing cold-blooded killers.  It’s bad guy versus bad guy, and the character that Luke {Evans} plays never wavers from being just awful and neither do we.  So it’s one of those things where it’s a very different movie in terms of there is no good guy.  There is no guy who you’re like, ‘Oh he kills because his mother was wronged and he’s getting vengeance.’  No, this dude, you never know why he does what he does; he just does it.  And I think that’s okay.

 

LMD:  Considering the film’s graphic nature, did you have any hesitation about acting in this movie that many of your younger fans can’t see?

BC:  At that particular time when I took the film, I was an evil bad guy; and I think you can’t do everything with mom and dad, and you can’t do everything with The Funkasaurus.  When I am The Funkasaurus on Monday nights, and Tuesdays, and on the weekends, and at the house shows and stuff - that’s our time.  I still believe that bedtime is 10:00, and this is an after 10:00 movie; so kids shouldn’t necessarily see it.   For the kids who are like, “But I wanna see Brodus Clay.”  Well, guess what?  We’re doing a Scooby-Doo project, so they can see that then.  It’s one of those things where you’re going to do different things as an entertainer in movies and commercials, and not everything is suitable for children.  But I think it’s important to be able to say, ‘This is not for you guys, and if you do watch it, you gotta watch it with your parents.’  It’s one of those things where it’s aggressive and it’s not what you’re used to, but that’s also a part of life, too.  There’s a learning opportunity there to be like, ‘Oh, you’re in a scary movie, I wanna go see it.’  Well, when you’re 18, go ahead, check it out, or when you’re with your parents.

 

LMD:  I’m a huge fan of your director Ryuhei Kitamura…

BC:  He did Godzilla: Final Wars, who isn’t?

 

LMD:  Tell me what it was like to work with him on your film debut?

BC:  Well, I was calling him Yoo Hoo cos I kept saying his name so wrong.  That was his nickname, Yoo Hoo.  Our first meeting, I would love to say he explained to me what Ethan was, and then he happened to mention Godzilla: Final Wars, which I had my Ipod with me, and I said, “That movie’s on my Ipod.” He said, “No, it’s not.”  I said, “I’m a huge Godzilla fan, and I actually have some issues.  Some things I wanted to bring up about the movie.”  He was like, “What?”  And I said, “Well this part here, and I think they could’ve spent more time here…”  I laughed about how they destroyed the American Godzilla - they called him Zilla - so me and him just hit it off from there. Then I said I collect action figures, and he sent me the DVDs and he sent me a site where I can get the authentic things from Japan.  So him and I after that, Besties.  And he’s a big wrestling fan and he’s like, ‘I wanna see this and that.’  He’s like a coach.  Like every scene, he’s there.  He’s on it.  So, if he doesn’t like something, you’ll hear it right then.  But he’s one of those guys who’ll say, “I don’t like it,” but he’ll say, “I don’t like it - this is why. This is what I need you to do. Can you give me this?”  And once you do what he wants, you go forward.

 

LMD:  In my research for this interview, I discovered your Twitter project called #365toredemption.  Can you tell us about that?

BC:  Well, Wrestlemania for me was a big day.  I had performed; I did the dance the year before.  The year before that, I was with Alberto on the outside with Christian.  So, this was the year I was gonna get my match.  I was nuts about it.  Due to time constraints, in a very classy way, we were told, “I’m sorry.”  And you take it on the chin.  And the first thing to do is whenever something like that - you worked all year for, you’ve fought and you scraped and you’re there - to have that taken away from you, sometimes the response can be negative, or the blame game, or complaining, or ‘Why me?’  I was truly heartbroken and I didn’t leave that arena.  I was the last guy on the bus.  I just waited.  And as I walked out, there were some fans that were chanting, “Brodus, you got screwed,” or whatever.  And before that, I wasn’t ever big on tweeting stuff; little things here and there, and I put up the thing about, “Sometimes in life you have to have your heart broken to know how much you love something. #365toredemption. We’re gonna get it back in a year.” And the response from that from fans – it wasn’t negative – and then I was just thinking.  I started with little positive things in the morning.  We all have things we want to improve.  And here’s the thing, there’s no guarantee there’ll even be a Wrestlemania next year, but it’s about the journey.  And if you work hard and you do everything you need to do, or you feel right and you don’t make it, you can still look back at all the accomplishments you made along the way.  The goal is I gotta get back to Wrestlemania, but then it’s just turned into this thing where I’ve had people share such amazing stories, and I retweet them and we talk about it.  A big thing has been when I first went with WWE, when I first came back I was 489 pounds, now I’m 362 pounds; so I’ve basically lost another person, and at the same time keeping my size and strength, which is hard to do.  The diet’s hard, the training’s hard.  So people relate to that.  I think I’m more relatable because you can see my flaws; because I’m always going to be chunky, that‘s not going to go away, and I got the weird hairdo, but it’s just who I am.  So I’m more relatable, I think, than a guy who’s completely shredded, and people are like, ‘Oh, I could never be like that.’  With me - you can’t teach size, obviously, but there’s the little things to relate - I have had the struggles.  I’ve had the failures.  I’ve been fired.  I’ve had the setbacks where I can show them, or even my upbringing in the foster homes and all that stuff; so I can show them the pattern, and so people I think relate to that and that’s why this thing has taken off.  And this is not me and writers sitting down putting this together; I’ve been doing this and we’re in day 24 today, which is  crazy how it’s been going by so fast, and people are like, “Hey, what’s going on with this?”  My goal is, it’s our journey, and I take pictures of the twitters and I save them on my phone, and so when I’m done, I’m going to print them all out and put them in a little coffee table thing and see if we could raise some money for charity or whatever, and get it published with everybody.  Everyone can show their successes, and you know, there’s gonna be a point where we have setbacks and letdowns, and we should be able to talk about that. And the more people open up about it; I just feel it’s good for everybody.  So I’ve turned a really personal tragedy in terms of my career - not getting that Wrestlemania match - into something positive, to where people are taking it and trying to run with it a little bit.

 

~ The Lady Miz Diva

May 1^st, 2013

 

Click here to read our Exclusive Interview with No One Lives director Ryuhei Kitamura.