Francesca Eastwood On Her Preparation To Play Mae Young For Queen Of The Ring

Francesca Eastwood plays the legendary Mae Young in the new film Queen Of The Ring, and she recently spoke about the preparation she did for the role. Eastwood recently spoke with Fightful for a new interview talking about her role in the Mildred Burke biopic, which releases in theaters on Friday, and you can see some highlights below:

On studying Young: “Well, that’s what I started with. I started with her later work because there’s just so much of it. I thought, ‘Oh, God damn. Like this is… What the—who in their right mind thought that I could do this?’ I was very intimidated. That never went away. But I started with the later work and then I started with the Dark Side of Wrestling and all this great footage and these interviews and her talk radio interviews. I went backwards on the journey of trying to find out, ‘Alright, who was this woman at a young age just starting out, just getting out of Oklahoma and just going and chase her dreams? Who was she then?’ I still get like the butterflies when I think about taking on a legend like her.”

On the potential for a series about Young: “When we were on set, and we would get into character and stuff, we were like, ‘God, don’t you wish we could do a little body slams through the table, like prosthetics.’ Mae, I could see her having her own show sometime. She was great.”

On her favorite Mae Young moments: “No, no, what I started in with was her induction speech, which was beautiful and very moving. Then I went into the hand and the body slam and the schoolgirl uniforms. I was like, ‘What am I getting into?’ and then trace it back to the beginning. So it was fun. It was fun. She seemed like she had a lot of fun. So this was a great role because at the end of the day, no matter how nervous I was, I was like, ‘What would Mae do? She’d have fun. She’d love what she was doing.”