GLOW‘s Marianna Palka On Coming Back For Season Two

In an interview with Wrestlezone, GLOW cast member Marianna Palka spoke about how excited she is that the show is coming back for a second season. The new season premiered today on Netflix. Here are highlights:

On coming back for season two: “It was so exciting and such a thrill to do the first season, and what we did in season one felt like it translated into what people saw. It really felt like being a superhero, a Wonder Woman—it didn’t feel normal—it didn’t feel like any job that any of us had ever done. It was amazing because we could be like ‘oh my God, here we are!’ Season one was so great and everyone loved it, then season two we’re like ‘OK, here we are, we’re going to do it again.’ It was even more exciting than what happened in the first season.”

On working with Chavo Guerrero Jr again: “Chavo always talks about how any wrestler, if they don’t wrestle for awhile, they’ll get ring rust. Any big time wrestler, even if you take a month off—we were all really nervous that we would be really bad, that we’d have to start from the beginning. He said the first week that we were back ‘Oh, you know what you’re doing’—it’s like we had the muscle memory of what we were doing with the first season behind us. We’re not doing anything that you can do in a gym, it’s not something you can do in a yoga class. We’re literally picking people up and throwing them around. It’s a specific skill, and I love that we get to do it.”

On filming the show intro: “I used to live on the Westside—I don’t live there anymore—but I used to go to that mall. [Los Angeles’ Westside Pavilion Mall] Taking over the mall, and having us all there, this Netflix show where we’re all these badass women, it just felt next level. You can’t really intellectualize it—it felt like we were in charge. We kept going into all of these different stores and people were really nice to us. The mall was technically not open, we were there and pretending to shop. It was funny—we went into Steve Madden in character—people working there were freaking out.”

On her favorite moment during filming: “I think my favorite moment—my family has this disease called Huntington’s Disease—it got cured while we were working on GLOW. Just the reaction of the other girls when I came into the ring after that had happened, because I had been working on curing this disease for twenty years, it’s been my life’s journey. When it happened, it was really amazing because we made this documentary on HBO called The Lion’s Mouth Opens. It got nominated for an Emmy and shortlisted for an Oscar. Because we raised money for it and it helped with everything and the cure, I feel like [the GLOW cast] the day after that were the most incredible people to talk to about it. We’re kind of like each other’s therapists.”

On the reaction to the show’s release: “I think it will be really interesting to see how the different characters develop. I’m really excited to see what happens. I’m really pumped about it. When [GLOW] comes out I’ll binge watch it with everybody else. I take it really seriously, I just love anything and everything that they throw at us. I think we’re lucky that it’s on television and also the fact that it’s on in 160 countries. It’s incredible that it’s come on at the same time as everything—it’s like the World Cup—it has that scope. My family in Poland is like ‘this is the best thing ever’ at the same time as my family in Scotland. I have friends all over the world that are freaking out because it’s happening simultaneously. I went from making my own Sundance movies—I’ve directed five feature films—ad when they come out, they always come out in a staggered way. That’s really nice—my movie Bitch is on Netflix as well—but everything’s sort of been in pieces until GLOW where now it’s just so nice to celebrate in this unified way with everybody.”