Maria's interview at Collector's Realm

Under the Ring interview with Maria Kanellis

Photo by Steve Credo.

Maria Kanellis is a busy woman these days. Just go to her Twitter page or her Facebook page to see how busy she is.

Since leaving WWE last year, she appeared on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice. She’s done music, short movies, mixed martial arts announcing and even has her own line of perfume that is launching soon. On Saturday night, she appeared in a wrestling ring for the first time in a while, getting involved at a Northeast Wrestling show in Torrington, Conn. On Sunday, she appeared at Collector’s Realm in Poughkeepsie, NY for an autograph signing. She took a few minutes out of her day to speak with me.

Phil Strum: It seems like you’re pretty busy, doing a lot of different stuff right now.

Maria Kanellis: Yeah, I am. I’m keeping busy. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve actually had time to myself to decide what I want to do next. I got into WWE when I was so young that I really hadn’t experienced that much yet. It’s the first time in my life that I’m able to do what I want to do. Experiencing new things. I loved working for WWE. It was an incredible experience, but I’m trying other stuff. Perfume. My new perfume line just came out (available here) online. You can find it online if you just look up Maria Kanellis Signature Perfume. I’m doing short films for friends. I’m doing a feature this summer. It’s not a huge feature. I’m writing two films. It’s crazy, so busy.

PS: Sounds like an exciting time. Like you said, trying to figure out what you want to do?

MK: Who knows? I might end up doing some more wrestling. I don’t know if I will or not. I miss it. I miss the crowds. I miss the people. I miss going out there and having that instant gratification. If you do an incredible move or something amazing happens in the ring, I miss that.

PS: I’m guessing you don’t consider yourself retired.

MK: I don’t ever consider myself retired from anything. Who knows? I might be Mae (Young) and (Fabulous) Moolah and going when I’m 75. It’s just, right now, it was a good time for me to get out, and try other things. Coming off of Celebrity Apprentice, it was perfect timing to try my hand at Los Angeles.

PS: What was that experience like doing Celebrity Apprentice and going from working for Vince McMahon to working for Donald Trump?

MK: I got fired by three billionaires last year.

PS: Three?

MK: Three. I worked for Mark Cuban on his network (Kanellis worked as a backstage interview for King of the Cage on HDNet). I didn’t really get fired by him though. I worked for Donald Trump and I worked for Vince McMahon. It was a very interesting year. Donald and Vince are very similar in a lot of ways. They are powerful men. They know what they want. They know how to get it. I like that. They both have really bad hair. They both have great walks. They both have great wives. I love Linda (McMahon) and I also love Donald Trump’s wife (Melania). I ws talking to her and I was mesmerized. This woman is incredible. There’s a lot of similarities between them.

PS: Something that hit me was that there were three different people with wrestling backgrounds on that show: you, Bill Goldberg and Cyndi Lauper.

MK: We talked about it all the time. We talked about it. We talked about how our paths had kind of crossed in the past. I loved Cyndi, but I hated working with her. I hated it every day, it was horrible. I had a good time.

PS: When you came up through the Diva Search, did you expect to be wrestling?

MK: No. I loved Jonathan Coachman. I loved what he and The Rock were doing. When they asked me in the Diva Search what I wanted to do, I told Coach, ‘I want to do what you do. I want to call you a popcorn fart just like The Rock did.’ They sent me to the next round. That’s what I thought I was going to do. Then, once you get in it, I want to do the physicality. I want to do all of that stuff. I just did.

PS: Was that surprising to you? When did you realize, OK, I’m a wrestler now and I’m wrestling matches?

MK: I never was. I never considered myself a full-time wrestler because I wasn’t always doing matches. A lot of times, I would do one little thing here or there to make the heel be a heel. It wasn’t like I was a full-time wrestler. A lot of times, I was the girlfriend, which is fine with me. I loved all aspects of it.

PS: And you got to work with Santino and try not to laugh. He’s pretty ridiculous.

MK: He is pretty ridiculous. I loved working with him. I loved working with (John) Cena. I got to work with Ric Flair. I worked with Dolph Ziggler near the end. I worked with Matt Hardy, I worked with Jeff a little bit. I cannot complain at all. My career was incredibly fun and amazing.

PS: I was wondering if you saw another wrestler on a reality show — Chris Jericho on Dancing with the Stars, and what you thought of that.

MK: I’m actually doing a new web series, not with Maria Menounos, but Maria Menounos owns the web site. It’s called AfterBuzzTV. I start this Monday at 10 p.m. Pacific. I’m actually going to be doing the AfterBuzz about Dancing with the Stars, so you will hear everything that I think about that, that night.

PS: What did you think about the first week?

MK: I did not watch it. I have to go tomorrow and watch it because I was filming something that night.

PS: In general, of wrestlers getting that kind of mainstream exposure, it’s very good for everybody who’s in the business, I would think.

MK: It is good for everybody. For me, it was helpful, but then it wasn’t helpful. I’ve had casting directors tell me before to never, ever, ever do another reality show because it’s hard to break that. I want to do films. I wanted that for a long time. I keep working. I keep fighting for it. Since I want to do films, although I would do Dancing with the Stars because I love it, I probably should stay more away from reality shows. It’s great for the business. It’s great to show people that wrestlers are not idiots. We have dreams. We have goals. We want to do things with our lives. I think that’s why Celebrity Apprentice was good. You saw Bill Goldberg and saw me on there. You saw all of us having these big opinions and big personalities, but also being very intelligent about what we were doing. I liked that part of it.

PS: Is it harder to shake that than wrestling when you’re getting into other things?

MK: A lot of wrestlers started to get into the acting world. You have Stone Cold. You have Rock. You have Stacy Keibler. She’s out there, trying to do it. You’ve got me going out there to do it now. You’ve got Katie Lea Burchill, Kat, Winter, whatever she’s being called now. Me and her, we go back and forth on what we’re doing now. She helped me meet up with somebody, and now I’m hosting horror DVDs too, which won’t be out for a while. We’re all helping each other and I think that’s a very positive sign that if all the wrestlers are working together, there’s enough of us and we’re intimidating enough, we can break in. We can get in Hollywood and make some films.

PS: If somebody wanted to look you up online, how would they go about it.

MK: Look me up on Twitter. It’s @MariaLKanellis. It’s the one with like 72,000 followers. So go to that one, not like the guy with 5, pretending to be me and saying weird stuff.

PS: And he has your name.

MK: And he has my name. I don’t have Maria Kanellis and somehow, he does. So it’sMariaLKanellis. You can also look me up on Facebook, which is Official Maria Kanellis and that’s my Facebook. I don’t update it. A fan does. But they update it from my Facebook because I can’t have any more friends. I’m much too friendly. You can look at those. You can get my music on iTunes. It’s coming out. I have a new music video for “Change Your Mind,” which should be coming out soon. You can look up “The Purple Plague,” which is a new short that I’m doing. It’s already come out with the trailer. There’s a lot of exciting things. I’m trying to make sure I didn’t miss anything! If you want to find my perfume, just look up my name.

PS: Any other messages that you want to give to your fans?

MK: Thank you. Thank you to everybody. Thank you for being supportive. Thank you for understanding that I wanted to try new things, so I did. Who knows if that might end tomorrow and I’ll go right back to wrestling? I don’t know.