GLOW Originals Talk About How Accurate The Netflix Show Is

In an interview with Wrestling Inc, GLOW originals Hollywood, Lightening and Royal Hawaiian spoke about how accurate Netflix’s original series based on their promotion actually is. Here are highlights:

Hollywood on finding out about the Netflix series: “When we found out that [the Netflix show] was happening, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! This is so cool!’ This is going to be a cool thing. And of course the next thing, what’s the next thing we all thought about? Are we gonna be involved? We thought of that. Yeah, are there cameos for the GLOW girls? All I can say for the last two-and-a-half years, this has reignited GLOW, our brand, and I think anything that reignites that for us is tremendous because we’ve done quite a few conventions.”

Lightening on being rediscovered: “People that know me and have known me for a long time have been coming up and they’re like, ‘You’re a GLOW girl?’ It’s really weird because they have known me for so long. They knew I was involved with wrestling and that’s pretty much what they said. ‘I knew you had a wrestling background but I had no idea you were a GLOW girl.’ They were totally fanboying on me, which cracks me up because I know them.”

Royal Hawaiian on how she started: “The pilot was where Jeanie and I started, and we were trained by Mondo Guerrero , and then from there, we went to Vegas, and then I was one of the first trainers to train the new girls that were added for season one. It was myself and Americana who were the trainers who trained the original season one girls. I was at the beginning but then people lost track of me because after season one, I got hurt and I left so then the seasons 2, 3, and 4, I didn’t know all of those girls except the originals that were in season one.”

Hawaiian on getting involved with the show: “It was exciting to hear that the Netflix show came out, and of course we though, oh, are we gonna be asked to do cameos or will we even be asked to – like, for me, I was a trainer – would I be asked to help? Cheryl [Lightening] is a trainer and a stuntwoman, so, would any of us be consulted? Would we be consultants on the show? But nope, none of us got anything and everyone was really surprised… Hollywood and Cheryl are both still wrestling today, still involved in the entertainment industry and worked… I’m an early retired person because of medical issues, so, I’m kinda just the gopher.”

Hollywood on how some details are exaggerated: “I remember when it first came out, I enjoyed it and a few of the other ladies did, but there were other girls who didn’t like it and they were comparing it, obviously, to our show. So, there are similarities and there are not but at the end of the day, what we’re talking about here is Hollywood, and no pun intended because you have to make things bigger, or better, or stretch the truth a little bit because if you don’t do that, how are you going to get your reoccurring fans? You’ve got to have drama, so, they have to create more, and I get that and so does Cheryl because being actresses, stuntwomen in the industry, its just the more the merrier, and a lot of the girls didn’t dig it at first. They were putting people down and it was ugly, I have to be honest with you. It was kind of disappointing to see some of them [react that way], and maybe they felt disappointed going, ‘No! Our director was never like that.’ No, we didn’t do drugs. And I’ll tell you right now, if you were caught drinking or doing any drugs, you were fired immediately.”

Lightening on how she feels about the show: “When I watched the first four episodes, I thought they were kind of draggy and slow because they were trying to establish everything, and I had to force myself past those first four episodes. But after that, I loved it. I think that they’re just trying to mix in the feel of the 80’s with GLOW. Everybody has kind of like this nostalgia thing, like the old West, everybody wasn’t running around town gun-slinging. They glorify it, and they glorified the 80’s but it’s fun. It is a lot of fun. Even though they didn’t consult with any of us, they hit here and there on stuff that actually happened or gave a feeling of the time, the era, which is interesting. And the whole thing with the first audition, they’ve got a bleacher with just a couple weirdos on the bleacher or whatever – it’s not a lot of them sitting in the bleachers, that’s the first thing I noticed right away. The first audition for GLOW there were, like, hundreds of girls, and they did up and walk out when they found out it was involved with wrestling. Half of the girls just walked.”