CM Punk Reveals His Two Big Takeaways From His WWE Career

In an interview with the Wrestling Perspective Podcast (via Wrestling Inc), CM Punk spoke about what he believes are his biggest takeaways from his time with the WWE: the amount of money he made and meeting his wife AJ Lee. Here are highlights:

On his biggest takeaways from WWE: “[The business] paid me a lot of money and I met my wife because of my job. Those are the two big takeaways, they did try to take a lot of my money but they were very unsuccessful in that. I think I’ve always been a big believer, and Dave Batista is the same way, calls himself the dream chaser. I just figured it out at an early age, probably because my parents forced me to go to church and stuff and immediately started to realize a lot of stuff was just b——t and life is short. You need to figure out what you love and just try to do that for a living. I was floored when somebody paid me, the first time I ever made money wrestling, I was like well f***, I don’t have to have a real job ever again. I was all in. It let me follow my dreams. I’ve been everywhere twice because of wrestling. I met my wife, all the fans bought my house, so I appreciate that.”

On the differences between wrestling and acting: “I very much look at wrestling nowadays as theatre. There was probably a time where I might have been offended if somebody said that, it’s like calling it fake. There was probably a time where I’d get mad if somebody called it fake, now I call it fake all the time. People will use the argument ‘Oh, well so are movies,’ and my argument is yeah, but Al Pacino didn’t go do pressers dressed as Scarface with his bullsh** accent trying to get you to really believe he was a Cuban immigrant that built a cocaine empire, yada yada yada. Pro wrestling is its own thing. If you view it as its own thing, it’s all things. You have to be in front of a camera, a lot of times it’s live television. There’s no higher pressure situation than live television, everybody watches you, your dick falls out, you sh** your pants, that all lives forever.”

On doing reshoots on a film set: “When you cross over to do film, it makes doing film a lot easier because you’re given a script and you get to work on your lines and if you f*** up you get to do it again. I’ve been on television shows where there’s been 20 takes. It’s not because anybody sucks, it’s because you’ve got to find your rhythm. Wrestling really prepared me for all that. The days at television make even the longest most gruley days on a set pale in comparison. I’ve already done it, so when people are like ‘We’re very sorry, we didn’t get the light, we got to shoot it again,’ I’m always like that’s cool, do it again. Where some actors will flip out and I’ve seen it.”