CORRECTION: Terri Runnels Talks About Her Marlena Character In WWE

UPDATE: A previous version of this article said that Runnels talked about her decision to leave Dustin Runnels. Wrestling Inc reports that the original transcript was incorrect and that “Dustin” should have been “Dusty,” which was specifically in reference to her leaving WCW. The quote has been corrected in the original article below.

ORIGINAL: In an interview with The Ross Report (transcript credit wrestlinginc.com), Terri Runnels spoke about her Marlena character, her relationship with Goldust and more. Here are highlights:

On walking out on WCW: “I walked out on Dusty one night, yes. Yes, I like literally, I walked out… Yes, I walked out… Whatever his mistaken thoughts were about how… I guess he thought I was, you know, a gold digger, which, interestingly enough, Dustin, God bless his soul, didn’t have a pot to piss in when we first started dating. I owned a property in downtown Atlanta [Georgia], you know, had a nice savings. I mean I was doing very well for myself. I didn’t need anybody, so I found that very interesting that, you know, that was one of the concerns. But yeah, in the beginning, I knew who I was. I knew that I loved and cared for Dustin and I was very protective of him in the sense that, you know, sometimes Dustin needs that. And you know exactly what I’m talking about, but I just, one night, decided ‘I’m not doing this’ and I just said, ‘I’m out of here’ and just left [WCW]. It was at Center Stage and I just walked out.”

On coming up with the idea of Marlena: “When I came up with the character of Marlena, I was laying in the tanning bed in our home in Stockbridge, Georgia. Dustin’s on the road. I’m there with [their daughter] Dakota and absolutely loving being a mommy. It’s not like I was saying, ‘God, I’ve got to get out of this house – I can’t do this’. I was happier than a pig in poop. But also, I’m a very creative person and I think it’s very easy for me to stand back and look at something with an overall view and say ‘there’s a deficit there, that needs that, okay, this needs the addition of this component or that’ and I was doing the same things.” Terri added, “Marlena was born in that one tanning bed session in my house and the weekend before that, I had been to my sister’s. And she collected these high end Barbie dolls and Bob Mackie, who used to design all of Cher’s dresses and Carol Burnett’s, he designed this Barbie doll, a limited edition, and the Barbie doll’s name was Sun Goddess. And that image, that visual, was what I saw for Marlena. And then, of course, I told Vince that I wanted either a glass of wine or a cigar that I enjoyed smoking to be a part of the character and we decided that the cigar would make more sense. And so it all just came to be. “A month later, Dustin called me and said, ‘where are you? Pack your bags. They want to do your idea, so that’s how that came to be. Here’s the lovely thing about that character: there was not one thing about that character anybody created other than me. Not one thing about that character. Now, storyline-wise, there were plenty of storylines that were created for that character, but everything about that character, not one of you guys created and I love knowing that the inception and the continuation of that character was everything that I conceived of in that tanning bed.”

On talk of giving Marlena a prosthetic penis: “I remember having creative meetings, Vince and I, probably Pat and maybe Bruce, Bruce Prichard. And having meetings of various kinds. One meeting, a creative meeting, we had about [the Marlena] character, was that there was a consideration to have the Marlena character have a prosthetic p—s and that the p—s would be, at certain times, depending on what [Marlena] wore, in a very subtle way, one could detect that there’s something going on there that is not normal.”