Chris Jericho has held many titles in his distinguished pro wrestling career; now, he’s branching out into horror movies.
The wrestling legend and current Ring of Honor world champion recently sat down with amNewYork Metro to discuss his new horror movie “Dark Match” and the connections the gory flick has to his early career.
Premiering on Shudder on Jan. 31, “Dark Match” tells the story of a greedy independent wrestling promoter who accepts a too-good-to-be-true offer to have his grapplers perform at a private show, only to discover the audience wants far more than just a performance.
Playing the charismatic cult leader Prophet, Jericho told amNewYork Metro that even though the film is a fantastical take on the independent wrestling scene, there are still aspects that both hysterically and morbidly reflect real life.
For instance, Jericho revealed that he once worked for a promoter who would most likely have booked him to work matches for an evil cult.
“I think back to every promoter that I worked with in the first few years of my career — there’s a guy called Bob Puppets, God bless him. That was actually his name: Bob Puppets. … I can see Bob Puppets getting a call for $50,000 to do a show in some small town in Alberta, and we would all get in our van, our rented school bus, or whatever the f**k it was, and go there. Now, if there was a satanic cult involved, well, so be it,” Jericho said.
The threat of working for a seedy business promoter isn’t the only true-to-life wrestling experience Dark Match brings to the screen, according to the Fozzy frontman. The act of banding together with fellow stars-in-their-eyes performers as they make treks to backward towns in cramped and downright poor conditions is likewise something to which Jericho can relate.
“The movie takes place in the late 80s and I started wrestling in 1990 so, I when I was a teenager, I was doing exactly what the people in this wrestling company are doing — getting in a van and traveling hours on end in rural, Manitoba and rural Alberta, and, the mountains of British Columbia,” Jericho recalled. “Thankfully, I never had to deal with the satanic cult in any of those towns. But I know what it’s like to show up in a very small area, and wrestling is the big thing of the night where the whole town is excited.”
Despite empathizing with and drawing upon many real-life experiences for the role of Prophet, Jericho said he yearned to dig deep into the role and become a different person.
Although he has played characters in several other movies and even hosted entertainment shows, he added that he didn’t want viewers to see Chris Jericho but instead the character himself. To achieve this, he says he took inspiration from a Stephen King novel.
“Once I started kind of delving into it a bit, and even seeing what the costume design was for the character, it really struck me as the dark man Randall Flagg from The Stand. And I really started thinking, this is a very cool Walking Dude-esque character where he’s basically the embodiment of evil on earth,” Jericho said. “That kind of really helped me lock into what I wanted to do, because I didn’t want people to look at this character and see, ‘oh, it’s Chris Jericho,’ which is hard, because obviously, I’m in a wrestling ring, I am surrounded by wrestlers and that sort of thing. But this movie is much deeper and darker than that.”
“Dark Match” will be streaming on Shudder later this month, but Jericho noted that he had the opportunity to see the film with a recent special Big Apple screening alongside avid wrestling fans.
“Obviously there were a lot of Jericho fans, but there were a lot of people that were really excited about seeing the movie. And in this day and age, listen, we all love streaming, and we all love the convenience of it. You can watch it on your phone, you can watch it on your laptop, but there’s nothing like going through the theater and seeing a movie, especially a movie that you’re in,” Jericho said.
Dark Match will be streaming on Shudder in Jan. 31.
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