CM Punk On Creating His Character For Heels, Staring In New Horror Film

CM Punk is starring in the newly-released horror film Jakob’s Wife as well as Starz’ Heels, and discussed both projects in a new interview. Sports Illustrated spoke with Punk about his latest roles and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — whether he’d be willing to return to wrestling. You can check out some highlights below:

On his new film Jakob’s Wife: “This is a great escape. There are a lot of issues going on—women’s identity, marriage, feminism. It’s a film that really makes you think. I love this movie because of the content, the issues it tackles, the parallels it has to great vampire movies like Lost Boys, and Barbara [Crampton] and Larry [Fessenden] are amazing. This movie was right up my alley, and I lucked out to be part of it.”

On agreeing to do the film: “I agreed to do it just because of Travis. Travis said, ‘I wrote this, I directed this and I want you to be in it.’ That was all I needed. This guy has had such a prolific career, and I’ll always jump at the chance to work with him.”

On being to create his character for Heels: “We just wrapped on season one. I’m going to wait for the producers to release the name of my character, but I play a wrestler—and they gave me the parameters, then I was able to mold the character into my own. This is a guy that I’ve shared locker rooms with. I’m sure wrestling fans will watch this show and they’ll, at various points, be able to point at me and go, ‘He’s doing this guy now.’ It’s really my love letter to one person specifically, and I don’t want to mention who it is. I want people to enjoy it as it organically happens.”

On a potential return to wrestling: “I don’t know. I’ve said no before in interviews. I’m not fishing for a deal. I get offered to do a lot of stuff, and I say no to 90% of it just because my thing is I need to work with quality human beings. It just seems like maybe in pro wrestling there is a lack of quality human beings. I don’t know. I like doing fun, quality projects. If there is a fun, quality wrestling project that gets sent my way, I will listen to it … I don’t need the money. And the way the wrestling business is now, it’s wacky. You’ve got WWE, who has multiple billion-dollar television deals, and the television’s awful. I go back there, I’m just another guy. And it’s not even that—I’d be just another guy that’s doing not-good television. I want to do stuff that’s good. I want my name attached to quality projects, where it’s fun and it makes people laugh, smile, think and people don’t hate watching it. I want to do fun stuff.”

On the relationship between wrestling and horror: “Pro wrestling, to me, was always about a simulated violent contest, and there’s obviously violence in horror movies so I can see the correlation. There’s also a union between wrestling fans and horror movie fans. Both are passionate and take it very seriously, and the rest of the world doesn’t. A horror movie has never won an Oscar unless you count Silence of the Lambs, but there are people that will bend over backwards and break their own necks to say that is not a horror film. The Venn diagram of wrestling fans and horror movie fans is like one big circle. It’s two mediums of art that have always been looked down upon.”