“People will say the only reason I’m champ is because I’m married to the boss’s daughter, but I was a champ before I married the boss’s daughter.”
Interview with a Triple H
Paul Michael Levesque, the man who was to become Triple H, was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge fan of pro wrestling, and during his teens he developed a love for bodybuilding. After high school he won several regional bodybuilding competitions and met Walter “Killer” Kowalski, who ran a wrestling school not far from Levesque’s hometown. Kowalski immediately saw potential in the young six-foot-four-inch muscle man, and took him on as a student.
In March 1992, Levesque had his first match in Kowalski’s IWF independent promotion, wrestling under the name Terra Ryzing, and eventually landed a contract with World Championship Wrestling, appearing as a snobbish French aristocrat named Jean-Paul Levesque. After his WCW contract expired, Paul visited the World Wrestling Federation backstage at Wrestlemania XI, getting acquainted with the locker room and meeting the men who would become his best friends in and out of the company: Kevin Nash, Shawn Michaels, Scott Hall, and Sean Waltman (collectively the five became know as “the Clique”)
Since making his spring 1995 appearance with what’s now called World Wrestling Entertainment — as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, a.k.a Tripple H a.k.a the Game — Levesque has done it all. He’s the only man in the history of the business to have been a Grand Slam Champion and to have won both a King of the Ring and a Royal Rumble. He’s also, at this writing, world champion.
Triple H’s dedication to the business was never more evident than on May 21, 2001. On that night’s WWE RAW, he teamed with Stone Cold Steve Austin to take on Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho in a tag-team championship match. During the bout, Triple H tore his left quadricep completely off the bone. Still, he somehow managed to finish the match. After eight months of grueling rehab, he returned to a hero’s welcome on the January 7, 2002, episode of RAW. His honeymoon with the fans did not last long. He also faced cynical colleagues who griped that the grappler was getting a bit too big for his wrestling trunks when he started dating (and later married) Stephanie McMahon, daughter of WWE chairman Vince McMahon. Though he has seemingly secured a spot at the top of the company food chain, Triple H says he can’t coast on his new family ties.
Proving his point, he’s also taking on Hollywood and the publishing industry. In his first movie role, he’s appearing in Blade: Trinity, scheduled to hit theaters December 10. In this third installment in the Blade series, Triple H tests his acting mettle opposite such Hollywood heavyweights as Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ryan Reynolds, and Jessica Biel. Also in December, the book Triple H Making the Game: Triple H’s Approach to a Better Body, written by Robert Caprio, will (Triple H hopes) bodyslam its way up the best-seller lists.
Penthouse sat down with the wrestling star recently to find out if indeed life is good when you’re the Game.
Tell us about the movie.
It’s the third in the Blade series and could be the last one, although I’m sure if it does well, they might resurrect it. There’s also the possibility of a spin-off called The Night Stalkers, which are the characters played by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel. Dominic Purcell plays the Dracula character. Parker Posey’s character leads the vampires who are trying to take over the world. And I’m her number-one bad guy. We go after Blade [Snipes] and capture him, and the night stalkers save him. It’s a lot of action, very dark. But Ryan Reynolds is very funny. The first one had a bit of dark humor in it, and I think this one expands on that.
A good choice for your movie debut.
Yeah, it was a good part for me. I have a big enough role that people can see that I have some ability and I’m not just a big dumb wrestler. Which I think is sometimes people’s misunderstanding of what we are. They don’t realize we’re actors as well as athletes.
Have you gotten a lot of bad scripts in the past?
Sure. Several years ago the WWE came to Rock and myself to see if we wanted to try some things in Hollywood. Rock obviously went on to do the things he did, and I had some setbacks with the injury. I got back into wrestling and reestablished myself and looked into the acting thing again. I’d get scripts, and a lot of times they were for a nonspeaking role or a guy with two lines who was just a bouncer. And it’s not like I need the job, you know? I could be selective about it. This Blade movie came up through New Line. And I had met a guy from New Line a few years earlier who really liked me. And Hollywood is in need of action stars right now. So he called me about this and said there was a role he thought I’d be great for, and we called up the director, David Goyer. David wasn’t necessarily a wrestling fan, and I think he had the stereotype image of the big dumb wrestler. But I met with him on the set in Vancouver and we hit it off. And some of the people involved in the movie who were initially my biggest doubters eventually became my biggest supporters. They actually wrote more scenes in for me and beefed up my part.
I’ve got another project in the works with John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now, Conan, and a bunch of other stuff. When I met with him four years ago, it was originally to talk about a film called King Conan. In the meantime, John had said he had a project in mind for me, and it was great. We’ve had some roadblocks with our schedules, but we’ll probably start shooting in the spring. I’m hoping for this second film that we can get some very quality people around me so it’s not just me. I have no delusions of grandeur thinking I’m the best actor in the world. I like to surround myself with good people to make it a better film, and hopefully any deficiencies I have, they can hide.
Did you do your own stunts?
The only things they wouldn’t allow me to do is where there’s a high risk that you’ll get hurt. Then they’d get you stitched up and they lose half a day. When you’re working on a $70 million film, that’s a big deal. They’d rather the stuntman get cut. They can always just bring in another stuntman. But it was a lot of fun getting to do the fight scenes. By the time we got to the bigger fight scenes, David [Goyer] was very comfortable with me and let me have a lot of input. So the final fight scene between Ryan and myself was created with me and the fight choreographer putting it together. We mixed and matched his ideas with mine, which was fun.
How did it compare to wrestling?
The biggest difference is, in wrestling everything is live and there’s no second take. If something’s not ready when nine hits on Monday night, it’s too bad, because the show’s going on anyway. With movies, there’s a lot of waiting around. My first day on the set, I’m in full costume, totally vampired out, and we get on set and there’s a lighting problem. This is at ten in the morning. We didn’t shoot our first scene until 10:30 that night. You can only sit around so long [until] you start going mental. On the other hand, the nice luxury is, in the movies, if you do something and then think, I wish I would have done it another way, you just ask for another take. But you also don’t have 40,000 people screaming when you do something to tell you whether it was good or not. You finish a movie and basically somebody goes, “Yeah, that was good. Okay, we’re moving on.” That’s your big applause. Then you have to wait a year for the film to come out. Our business [pro wrestling] moves so fast, I can’t remember what I did three weeks ago. By the time I watch this movie, I’ll have forgotten much of what I did in it, so it’ll kind of be a surprise to me too.
Will you focus on action movies?
First off, I don’t want to leave wrestling. At the top of my resume, it’s always gonna say “wrestling.” That’s what brought me to the dance, and I know what I love to do. I would like to do movies, but not constantly back to back. If I did a movie a year, or two at the most, that would be plenty.
We need a few more action stars.
I think there are certain guys who in the right roles can be action stars. Like in The Bourne Supremacy, Matt Damon works great because the character doesn’t need to be a giant guy. But when I see Ben Affleck play Daredevil, come on! There’s nobody buying him beating people up. I think there’s a big gap right now. I’ve read interviews where Vin Diesel said he also wants to do romantic leads, and be a dramatic actor. And I applaud what he wants to do with his career. But as for me, I’ll blow all the shit up that you want. I’ll kill everybody in the movie and be the action guy. That’s fine with me. I’ve got no real aspirations of being an Oscar-winning actor. I just want to entertain people.
And you also have a book.
A lot of people in wrestling have done the “my life story” type of books. To me, a biography is something you write as you’re wrapping up a career. Ric Flair writing a book is awesome because he’s had a huge career. But with the younger guys you have stuff like, “I read comic books.” It wasn’t something I was interested in doing. But they kept bugging me to do a book, so we tried to think of a different approach. The most frequently asked question I get is “What do you do to work out?” or “How do I get my arms like that?” For your average guy, as far as physique goes, there aren’t a lot of role models out there. If you look at pro bodybuilding, it’s gone to an absurd level where the average person doesn’t want to look like that and has no prayer of looking like that. Football players are all covered up. Baseball players, some look like shit. I think a lot of guys look at wrestlers and think they wouldn’t mind looking like that. I get asked it so frequently that I thought I should just do a book on it. It chronicles a bit of my career, but I tried to incorporate how bodybuilding affected my life. It’s kind of a how-to book on working out, and a little bit on my career. I think there’s a lot of young guys out there that go to the gym but don’t really know what they’re doing. When I was 14, somebody pointed me in the right direction. So this allows me to hopefully point a bunch of other people in the right direction.
Do you ever have trouble with guys who want to take you on?
I’ve gotten to a point where I avoid bars altogether, mainly for that very reason. You think to yourself, I wouldn’t mind going down to the bar and having a drink with the guys. But then there’s always somebody. Guys get a cup of liquid courage in them, and they’ve got nothing to lose. If they get their ass kicked, everybody expected it anyway. If they beat you up, they’re the big hero. And if you beat them up, they’re gonna sue you. It’s a lose-lose situation all the way around for the wrestlers. For some reason, I think as wrestlers we get it more often than other actors or athletes… especially when you play the bad guy. Everybody wants to take a shot at you.
Do you like playing the bad guy?
I love it. There’s more meat to it. I find it a lot more fun to get under people’s skin. In society now, the hard thing is to do something to make people not like you. It seems the worse the things you do, the more they like your character. You really have to keep digging to find things to do that they dislike.
How much input do you have into your storylines in the ring?
We all have input, but the bottom line is, it all comes down to Vince [McMahon]. He’s gonna do whatever’s best for business. A lot of people look at me and go, “You have an advantage, you’re the son-in-law.” Vince is where he is today because he can separate business from everything else. If it’s right for business, he’ll do it. If not, he won’t, no matter whose idea it is. We all have input within our characters. Vince really wants the wrestlers to be comfortable with what they’re doing, because if you feel it, you’ll give a better performance. And as Vince says, nobody knows the character better than the guy doing it. But Vince decides the ultimate direction.
Was there ever anything that you did and later regretted?
We did an angle a while ago —
Might this be the notorious Katie Vick incident?
[Editor’s note: Triple H’s most notorious ring moment on TV was part of a storyline rivalry with fellow wrestler Kane. Triple H claimed Kane was the driver in a car crash that killed Kane’s fictional high school sweet-heart, Katie Vick. Worse, Triple H insinuated that Kane had sex with the girl’s dead body Worse yet, Triple H enacted a funeral-home scene in which he — dressed in Kane’s costume — appeared to be humping a corpse dressed like a cheerleader. The story, forever to be known as simply “the Katie Vick incident,” earned its place in the pro-wrestling hall of infamy.]
Let me put it this way: It wasn’t my idea. This is one of those things that Vince was really high on. We were riding over to the shoot where I [would be] dressed up like Kane and [have] sex with the mannequin, and it was me, Vince, and one of the stage directors. And we were trying to convince Vince to do this differently. We said, “Vince, this is horrible. This is not gonna be good.” And he says, “I’m telling ya, I want it very dark. I want it disturbing.” We wanted it to be funny. But Vince was adamant. We did it, and I tried to do it as good as I could. But when we were leaving, I was in the car going, “Man, that was brutal.” I didn’t even want to watch it when it aired. And now it’s one of those things that everybody always brings up. They’ll talk about “the Katie Vick incident,” and I’m like, “Ew, please don’t bring that up.” And I’ve never asked Vince about it. But knowing Vince, he’d think it was great. Because people still talk about it, don’t they? But you can’t hit a home run every time.
You were also part of the popular DeGeneration X team [formed by Triple H and Shawn Michaels, and known for its graphic language and such gestures as the “crotch chop, ” a crossing of the arms across the crotch accompanied by the taunt “Suck it!” — which must have been fun.]
Shawn and I felt the business needed a different attitude. We started to do it, and we were just being jack-offs. I remember Shawn doing something on TV, and the office fined him $10,000. Shawn was so pissed off. But the ratings went up. We got letters every week from USA Network telling us to knock it off. They threatened to take us off the air. But ratings were going up. Once we did a spoof in the beginning of the show with Shawn and me at a podium. We said, “DX is changing its ways, and during the hour from nine to ten, we will no longer use the words ass or shit, but from ten to 11, we can use fuck, and this and this…” That was actually [taken from] a letter from USA Network. It was sent to Vince, basically saying, “Here are the rules. From nine to ten, DX can’t do this, and from ten to 11, they can’t do this.” Vince asked us what we wanted to do, and we said, “Let’s stick this up their ass.” That was the turning point. They wrote another letter the next day saying, “That was very creative, how you used our own stuff against us. Congratulations on the ratings.”
But as we went along and kept doing the crotch chop, I’d be on the road and get ten calls from guys saying, “Hey, did you see the guy who scored a touch-down and did the crotch chop?” There were a couple of references in movies, and it just got so big that it was everywhere. If I walked down the street in New York, all I would hear is people yelling, “Suck it!” It took on a life of its own. It’s a little wild when it first happens. I’d hear about it and think it was just something similar. But then I’d see guys doing it on TV and think, Sure as shit, they’re doing our stuff.
I’ll kill everybody in the movie and be the action guy. That’s fine with me. I’ve got no real aspirations of bein an Oscar-winning actor.
Off camera, you seem to be the man that some wrestlers love to hate. Do you think you rub some of your colleagues the wrong way?
Here’s my feeling on it: There’s an old saying, “It’s lonely at the top.” When you’re one of the top guys, there are gonna be people that hate you. There’s always gonna be people that don’t have the ability but think they do, and think they should have your spot. The fact is, if they had the ability, they would be there. There will always be that kind of jealousy in any business. I knew when I met Steph and we started dating…
But I don’t read the dirt sheets and I don’t go online. Anybody in our business that needs to go online for justification as to whether they had a good match or not, [looking for] a 12-year-old kid on the Internet [to say] they did — that’s the reason they’re not a top guy. If you don’t know whether you had a good match or not, if you don’t know whether your interview was good or not, that’s the reason why you’re not a top guy. Because you suck bad enough that you can’t figure it out on your own. What I do is, I go to the building and I do my job. If I’m put in a match, I try to have the best match I can. I’ve never claimed to be the greatest wrestler alive. I can’t do a moonsault. I can’t do all those flips. I try to have the greatest matches and the best interviews I can. I try to help out the young guys as much as I can. If you were to ask those guys, I don’t think they’d complain about it. I’m not in the business for a popularity contest. But marrying my wife certainly didn’t help.
Cynics saw that as just the ultimate career move for a wrestler
Sure, people will say the only reason I’m champ is because I’m married to the boss’s daughter. But I was a champ before I married the boss’s daughter. I was a top guy before I ever met Steph. People forget all that stuff. You know, there was a lot to consider when Steph and I first got together. It was a big strain on our relationship at first, but we fell in love, and you’ve got to make a decision. You’re either gonna go for it or not. We went for it and decided it was other people’s problem. And anybody that knows Vince well knows he takes shit out on people he’s closest to. It’s actually more difficult for me to be in the position I’m in now than before. Before, I was just talent, but when you’re a top guy, you carry a lot of weight with Vince. Now I’m the son-in-law, so it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, just do what I tell you to do.” If it was Stone Cold Steve Austin and they said, “This is what we want you to do,” there’s always the possibility of Steve saying, “I don’t wanna do that.” Well, Vince knows I’m not gonna say that. And people think I have an unfair advantage in having Vince’s ear 24/7. But Vince never wants to talk business with me. You would not believe what I have to go through to get him to sit down and talk business. When he’s around me, it’s personal time now. He’s my father-in-law, and we have a great relationship. But when we all go out, he doesn’t want to talk business. He wants to talk about everything but business. So it’s almost the opposite of what everybody thinks it is.
Are they asking you for grandchildren?
Oh, yeah. When Vince’s son Shane announced he and his wife were expecting, Vince looked at me and said, “Well, at least I know one of my sons isn’t shooting blanks. Somebody else could give me some grandkids too.” And my parents, too, are always asking. I think it’ll be in the near future. We’re both realizing it’s never gonna be the perfect time to do it because we’re so busy. We can’t plan out nine days, let alone nine months. And I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be the guy who missed his kids growing up. That’s why I waited so long to have serious relationships and even think about getting married.
It seems your kids will be destined to get in the wrestling business.
A lot of people in the business, if their kids said they wanted to be in wrestling, they’d say, “Jesus Christ, no.” I’m not like that. I think this is a great business. Anybody who does drugs in our business made a personal choice to do that. It has nothing to do with the business. Sure, you have more opportunities if you live a certain lifestyle. But you still make a choice. So if my kids said they wanted to get into wrestling, I would say, “Great.” But if they wanted to, say, write poems or design stamps, that’d be awesome too. I’m a big believer in doing whatever you want to do, but doing it to the best of your ability. And it’s like that old saying that if you have a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Because I love what I do, so it’s fun.
You’ve had friends who succumbed to the pitfalls of celebrity
When I see friends of mine who I lost because of drugs, it pisses me off. It’s stupid. Some people try to blame it on the business or the WWE. That’s like blaming Sony Music for every rock star who has ever died of an overdose. I’ve never done drugs. I don’t even really drink, except on rare occasions. If it’s the business, how come there’s a lot of us guys who don’t? I think sometimes kids see that drugs are so glorified on TV and they don’t see the final result, which is death. You’ve got young guys that are … well, young, dumb, and full of come, as the saying goes. They’re on the road every night, making a shitload of money, with women throwing themselves at them. The opportunities are there, whether it be booze, women, drugs — whatever. When you’re on the road, sometimes it seems as if the rules of the rest of the world don’t apply.
Was the quad injury your worst?
Knock on wood, yeah. It was very career-threatening. Dr. [James R.] Andrews is the top guy in orthopedics. He’s done pretty much all my surgeries. Toward the end of my rehab, he said he’d gotten a call from Sports Illustrated wanting to do an article on guys returning to football from quad tears — full-on quad tears like I had, not partial tears. And he started researching it, and he couldn’t find anybody who’d done it. And he said, “Hunter, if you come back and go full-tilt, you’ll be the first guy.” It didn’t dawn on me until then just how serious this had been. But I had never let it enter my head that I wouldn’t come back. I stayed in Alabama for ten months doing my rehab, living in a hotel room, and my wrestling gear stayed in the corner there the entire time. And when I left to come home, I put the same gear in my bag that I’d worn the night I got hurt. There was no way I was not gonna come back.
Do you eventually just get used to being hurt all the time?
The pain tolerance in our business is unbelievable. I’ve worked with a cracked kneecap and lots of other injuries, and there’s a lot of guys in our business who would do the same thing. But you have baseball players who take a week off for a stomachache or a stubbed toe. There’s a few guys in our business who I’ve seen take time off for a tummyache, but for the most part, it’s a pride thing. If I’m going to Peoria tomorrow and my name is advertised on top of that card and I don’t show up, that’s a big problem. That’s the pride of our business, because you know it’s all on you. There is no second-string Triple H that plays for me if I’m hurt.
Let’s talk about groupies.
The guys call them ring rats. I didn’t do drugs or any of that; my vice was women. I had a pretty strong run. Ten years ago, you’d go to the hotel bar at night and there’d be 100 women there. It was fish in a barrel. Over in Europe or Japan, where we didn’t go that often, we were like the Beatles. Instead of 100 girls in the lobby, there were 2,000.
Before marrying Stephanie, you were involved with [former female wrestler] Chyna for a long time. Did women still come on to you even when she was there?
There were a few times. With Steph, it’s a bit different. The only time it was an issue was when we went to Japan and we were getting off the bus, and there were about 1,000 fans, mostly women, and they started swarming me, yelling, “Hunter!” And Steph just got bowled over. They knocked her down, and she was so mad. I caught shit for that one. But these days I really just don’t even go to the bar at all. It’s just too much of a hassle. I’d much rather go to my room, have a steak, and go to bed.
Chyna said recently that she has a sex tape of her and [pro wrestler] X-Pac that she may sell.
I think he was pissed, and then — in true guy style — he said, “Well, as long as my hose looks big, I don’t care.”
Are you going to pick up a copy?
No. I’ve seen it. Been there, done that. With her, I mean, not him.
How long will you keep wrestling?
If you’d asked me before I tore my quad, I’d have said, “Shit, I’ll go forever.” Injuries have a way of making you realize you’re human. Up until that point, I’d been pretty much a Teflon guy. I love the wrestling business, though, and think it’s something I’ll always be involved in — if not in the ring, then behind the scenes. Hopefully, if everything goes well, doing things in Hollywood. And then the most important thing to me will be family … having kids and getting them raised.
You’re not getting any younger, so you might want to get started.
See, but that’s the beauty of guys. You can plant seeds late. The farmer doesn’t have to be young, he just needs fresh soil. And my wife’s younger than me, so I’m in business.
Full disclosure, we really wanted to explore that “plowing young fields” a bit more, but some executive editors just have no sense of humor. It’s sad. Consequently, we’ll just have to be satisfied by telling you where you might get up to date on Triple H these days. Too bad, really, because we’re super hysterical.
