There was a time when Chris Jericho had an on-screen quarrel with Academy Award Nominee Mickey Rourke. It was back in 2009, Mickey Rourke and Chris Jericho fought onscreen before WrestleMania 25. After the release of the cult classic movie The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke a lot of fans were expecting to see Rourke and Jericho might face each other at WrestleMania.
But that did not happen, fortunately. Instead, Jericho fought in a gauntlet match with three WWE legends; Ricky Steamboat, Roddy Piper, and Jimmy Snuka. After Jericho won the match though, he encountered Rourke where he was knocked out by the Hollywood legend.
Chris Jericho Talks Celebrity Involvement In Wrestling
Jericho recently on the Hollywood Life was interviewed and he was asked about the celebrity involvements in wrestling. He said;
You [now] have guys that have a large amount of respect for pro wrestling. You can throw the Jay Leno name in there, and I will raise you a Karl Malone and a Dennis Rodman. Lawrence Taylor, way back in the day.
There are athletes and guys like Bad Bunny who have been lifelong fans of wrestling and really respect what we do and want to be involved. Those are the ones that always work the best. If you take a guy who doesn’t want to do the training and do the things to put on a good match, you will not get one. Then it becomes more of just a stunt casting, shall we say.
But someone for Shaq, he took it very seriously. He worked very hard to put on the match he did. The same thing with Bad Bunny — you can tell the training was there because what he did was very much like the match we had with Shaq. After the match, [Shaq] said, ‘I wanted to make you proud, brother!’
I don’t think [these recent celebrities] want to come in there and embarrass themselves or, more importantly, embarrass the sport with all the respect that they have for it. It’s the same thing with Mike Tyson. He loves being around the business and respects the business, and he has since he has been a kid. All he wants to do is his best. And at the end of the day, he is Mike Tyson, so there is always that element of what he is going to do. But if he didn’t want to be there for the right reasons, he wouldn’t be there.
Celebrities and wrestling (preferably WWE) had a long time relationship with each other. In most cases, WWE treated celebrities as huge deals. Most of the time they allowed them to pick up victories on wrestlers.
There are many examples of these incidents like the most recent one from WrestleMania 37, which Jericho also mentioned, Bad Bunny’s match. Celebrities in wrestling are fun to watch but they really do not have much purpose other than making money. We hope WWE would only do what fans want to see, someday.