New door opens for Ronda Rousey after UFC Melbourne KO
AFTER her UFC fight career ended on the mat in Melbourne, Ronda Rousey picked herself up off the floor and reinvented herself as a triple-threat entertainer across movies and the WWE.
Entertainment
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SHE was the undefeated UFC champion, a trailblazer for women in mixed martial arts, until that air of invincibility was shattered in the middle of a ring in Melbourne.
Ronda Rousey won’t talk about that fateful fight.
But the 31-year-old is promising “a great show” when she returns as a wrestler for the WWE Super Show-Down at the MCG in October.
“I’m coming to entertain,” Rousey says. “I hope you guys enjoy yourselves.”
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Rousey’s UFC career was all but ended at Etihad Stadium in November 2015 when challenger Holly Holm knocked the champion to the canvas.
Her WWE signing was revealed in January of this year with a surprise appearance at Royal Rumble and Rousey has been acclaimed for bringing an air of excitement and equality to the mammoth sports-entertainment franchise.
“Women in the WWE have been working for generations to be able to perform on equal stages to men and I can only hope to contribute to their efforts,” she says. “I’m not the first one here and I definitely will not be the last, but I really hope that the WWE and its ‘women’s evolution’ are better off for me being part of it.”
Rousey will join superstars including John Cena, Triple H and The Undertaker at the ’G on October 6 for a blockbuster event expected to break attendance and worldwide viewing records.
Asked whether she had any reservations about returning to Melbourne, Rousey replied: “We’re not gonna talk about that question. Let’s move on.”
Almost three years down the track, and having followed the likes of Dwayne Johnson and John Cena into the wrestling arena, Rousey says acting is her top priority.
“I’m doing WWE now and I’m in films, but the constant between the two of them is I’m acting,” says the Californian. “Of course WWE matches require physicality, but it’s much more similar to doing a fight scene in a movie than being in an actual fight.
“I see why a lot of acting talent comes from WWE, because it’s one of the last live performing arts. Imagine being in a Broadway play where the crowd was actively trying to distract the actors and make them mess up.
“WWE just seemed like a marriage of all the things that I love: I love to fight, I love to act, I love to entertain.”
Before joining Cena and wrestling’s other big names in the WWE Super Show-Down at the MCG in October, Rousey is giving her movie career a kick in a different direction with Mile 22, the gritty new thriller from director Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg.
Yes, it’s an action film — Wahlberg is the leader of a quick reaction force called upon when diplomatic and military options fail — but unlike her previous roles in The Expendables 3 and Fast & Furious 7, Mile 22 didn’t require Rousey to use her fists.
“That’s the thing I loved most about this project — it was entirely outside of my comfort zone and very different from anything I’ve ever worked on before,” Rousey says.
Yet that wasn’t always the plan. Having seen bonkers Indonesian flick The Raid, Berg wanted to make his own martial-arts movie with its breakout star, Iko Uwais.
“The original Mile 22 was pretty much just me and Iko having a Raid-esque movement through a city,” Rousey recalls.
But after Rousey met Wahlberg when she had a role in the Entourage movie, Berg asked Wahlberg if he’d be a part of Mile 22 and that, says Rousey, “brought the whole project a completely different level”.
In the ensuing rewrite, Berg decided Rousey would be better put to use as Sam, the weapons expert on Wahlberg’s team — still more-than-capable in a stoush, but tactical and cool in a crisis.
“As time went on, I think Pete made the right call in wanting me in there specifically to not fight,” Rousey says. “The faith he had in me to deliver in this film, to be able to hold my own and make this film better off for me being in it, and not because I can fight but because I can act, I felt I had a huge responsibility to prove him right.
“I took this as serious as I would have taken any fight. I trained for this. I put the same hours into studying for this role I would preparing for a fight.”
That training included being put through her paces by a real-life Navy SEAL and Army Ranger.
Rousey is surprised at how much she enjoyed “being able to live in their world for a little bit”. After hours, she’d practice the procedure for clearing a building around the house she shares with her husband, UFC fighter Travis Browne (the pair married in Hawaii a year ago after Browne popped the question under a waterfall in New Zealand).
“I mostly would just point at him and say ‘Bang bang’, that was my definition of clearing the room,” Rousey laughs. “I wish I could train as a civilian because it was not just fun but empowering knowing that I really knew how to safely move around.”
With John Malkovich running the hi-tech Overwatch unit that monitors and troubleshoots for Wahlberg’s Ground Branch team — Rousey, The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohen and Prison Break’s Carlo Alban — Mile 22 tasks its heroes with getting an asset from the US Embassy to an airfield.
But the route through this fictional Southeast Asian metropolis is a gauntlet of bullets and corrupt officials determined to eliminate that asset: a cop offering vital intelligence, played by Uwais.
“It’s a genre-redefining action film and it just happens to be written by a woman (Lea Carpenter) and it happens to have very powerful women characters in it,” Rousey points out. “I love that it’s not a novelty, that it’s almost expected or casual. I hope that’ll be the norm some day.”
Mile 22 hinges on the concept of a team becoming family; Rousey says this team could have had no better father figure than Wahlberg.
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“‘Leader’ is a really great word for him,” she says. “He sets the tone for everybody’s level of professionalism. He’s always very kind, very generous with his time, but also you knew not to screw around or to waste anyone’s time when he was there. He kept everyone on task. He’s a huge part of what makes this film as awesome as it is.”
When she found scenes challenging — like one with Wahlberg where “there was a lot that needed to be portrayed that wasn’t said” — Rousey would work with her acting coaches or Berg to get it right.
“I’m surrounded by the best in the business, surrounded by teachers, so I’m constantly asking for advice,” she says.
And she’s determined to keep working at it.
“Acting isn’t my get rich quick scheme, it’s not my scheme to get famous, it’s something that I really love doing.”
Berg, for one, is impressed by Rousey’s drive.
“I’m very proud of her as a human in terms of the adversity that she’s overcome and what she went through in the UFC,” the director says. “To go from being that dominant (to) back-to-back losses would be enough to send most people to the North Pole forever. But the fact that she picked herself up, got married and has reinvented herself — I’m very impressed.”
Asked if she believes she has reinvented herself, Rousey almost audibly shrugs.
“I’m still me,” she says. “It’s just me.”
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