Queen Of The Ring Director Reflects On Casting Kamille & Toni Storm

Queen of the Ring director Ash Avildsen recently spoke about casting AEW stars Kamille and Toni Storm in the movie. Kamille plays June Byers in a major role in the Mildred Burke biopic, while Storm plays Clara Mortenson. Avildsen, who wrote and directed the movie, spoke with the Wrestling In Film Oodcast about the film and was asked about casting the two in the movie.

“Yeah, you know, they both have — Some people have period faces,” Avildsen began (per Fightful). “The faces that are just more friendly to a period, right, and some people just look more modern. It’s kind of this intangible when making period [pieces], you need your actors to look like they match the time. So Toni — and this was before the Timeless character came out — she just nailed it. The same thing with [Kamille] having the physique of June Byers to be able to eclipse Emily’s physique and to really be dominant as a very dangerous opponent.”

He continued, “They were both so great, it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing them. Just from a production standpoint because they were both shoot — Two of the shoot matches are Tony and [Kamille], there’s a lot of wrestling involved in their characters and scenes. It was going to be very hard to do that without real wrestlers, to switch out stunt people, we have to shoot for hours and hours, they’re taking bumps longer than they’d ever taken in a normal match because there’s all these different camera setups and angles. So, they were just very resilient and very fearless with what they put their bodies through for the sake of independent film and I’m forever grateful for them doing that.”

The film also stars Emily Betts Rickard as Burke, Josh Lucas as Billy Wolfe, Tyler Posey as Wolfe’s son G. Bill, Francesca Eastwood and Mae Young, Walton Goggins as Jack Pfefer, and Deborah Ann Woll as Gladys Gillem. Wrestling stars Jim Cornette, Trinity Fatu, and Britt Baker also have roles. It releases on March 7th in theaters.