Steve Austin (known to wrestling fans worldwide as ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin) had a bit part in the 2005 remake of The Longest Yard but the action thriller The Condemned marks his first starring role in a feature film. Austin said that making the transition from the wrestling ring to movies wasn’t that difficult, in large part because the The Condemned was a World Wrestling Entertainment project financed by Vince McMahon. The biggest adjustment was just the slow pace of a movie set compared to doing live TV.
Austin filled his spare time on the set doing something constructive. “Coming from a very time efficient machine into hurry up and wait is interesting,” explained Austin. “I ended up, because I had so much time in my trailer, I learned two different languages while we were shooting: Spanish and German.”
In The Condemned Austin plays Jack Conrad, a convict sentenced to death for blowing up a building and killing three men. As Conrad’s waiting for the death penalty to be carried out, prison officials make a deal with a reality game show producer, forcing Conrad into fighting to the death against nine other prisoners in order to gain his freedom.
On Wrestling vs Making a Movie: “You know what? When you live 15 years on the road, I always tell people you kind of turn into a zombie in a way because you just become impervious to a lot of things, and you just go through. You see some things and some things you don't because you're so busy doing what you do. It's a tough way to make a living, but it's the most fun you'll ever have.
Being on a movie set, long hours, I have a whole new respect for actors and actresses, just as far as the long days on the set or if you go into nights and shooting in the early mornings, just the preparation that you take into a role, whatever the part is, just the long hours. And, in this case, dealing with some really, really tough locations and weather, and you know what? We had some real long, tough days on the set but I always look at it like this: if you're lucky enough to be on a movie set, that's great because I worked on a freight dock, loading and unloading trucks, for a living. That's what I did before I got into wrestling. I know what hard work is. I'm a manual labor specialist. There are people out there working construction, saving lives, jobs like that. When all you're doing is working on a project entertaining people like that, it's a good day at the office.”
Fighting on Film: Austin admits it was a little difficult to make the adjustment from a 20 minute live fight to the carefully choreographed fight scenes in The Condemned. “Man, I'll tell you what, people said, ‘It must have been easy for you to learn the fight scenes because of your background.’ Not really, because in a wrestling ring, contrary to what anybody believes, you're working ad-libbed, improv'd. You do things to elicit a response from the crowd. Based on that response, you go accordingly. You keep doing that. You do that for, say, you have the 20 minute match you're talking about, that's how you work that match, and that's why it's ring psychology. It's not just two guys randomly taking turns beating each other up. It's much, much more than that.
So then when you take my loose brawling style that I use in the wrestling room and all of a sudden I'm Jack Conrad and I have a military background so I need a precise fighting style, which is what I should have had. You take that and now all of a sudden you're forced to remember choreographed fighting moves. You're not familiar with the moves because they're different from the old ones and now you've got to remember every duck, every punch, every kick. And then you have seven or eight fights on top of that, it was very frustrating.”
Injuries on the Set of The Condemned: Despite careful planning, accidents do happen. “You know, Vinnie [Jones]…I'll tell you, we had the one fight scene on the river bed where he got a bunch of lumps and bumps from me pounding on him. And then early on in the movie there's a fight with me and the Mexican, Paco [played by Manu Bennett]. He's supposed to hit me low and then hit me high. Well, he leaves out the low shot and hits me high right in the eye, gives me a black eye. If you rewatch the movie, you'll see the black eye in the movie. We just had to cover it up with makeup because we needed to be time efficient and keep going. I always tell people, ‘In professional wrestling, you really hit each other but you don't really try to hurt each other.’ You take care of each other, but there's contact made. So that when someone hits you too hard, you send back a receipt. So I never got a chance to send him my receipt. I'm going to put him in the next movie and I'm taking him out.”
Film Offers a Little More Freedom: Austin could have had more dialogue – and colorful dialogue at that – but he chose to cut back a little on his lines. “You know what? This was a hard movie. It was a violent movie, but there was humor in this movie. The instances that Jack Conrad is using those words, it's a release so it was funny. I mean, it was fun and then along the same lines, but not really related, in this movie, we never went out for one-liners and we never went out for anything cute.
As far as Jack Conrad's dialogue, I would go to Scott Wiper's room and we'd watch some stuff. We'd have a few cocktails and we'd be discussing tomorrow's scenes and I would tell Scott, ‘You know, I don't think I need to say this.’ And it was a relief for him because he's thinking the same thing, because Jack Conrad didn't need to say a lot of things. He says something when it's necessary but you're not going to get too many actors who are the main reason the film is being shot saying, ‘Hey, let's take out some of my dialogue.’ He was thinking along the same lines, so we'd tweak stuff. We'd change it around and make it what it was. It was a fun process to go through.”
