Before she broke into the world of professional wrestling, Heather Monroe settled in Los Angeles to pursue another dream.
After growing up in Altoona, Iowa, Heather Monroe had grand ambitions to leave the small town. “I wanted to do something in entertainment for as long as I can remember,” she told WrestleZone’s own Ella Jay. Monroe initially joined the theater scene in elementary school, performing in various plays and productions, before acquiring a degree in theater arts at the University of Iowa. Upon graduation, Monroe made the move to the big city of LA.
“[I thought] this is the place I have to be if I want to really pursue it,” she said. “I always loved Los Angeles. I always visited out there and I go, and I was like, ‘I want to be a part of this.'”
Describing the original vibe of Los Angeles as “chill,” Monroe began venturing into the acting and comedy realm, taking on work in improv, student films, and pilots. When she first started her deep dive, Monroe recalled a rather strange gig she booked. “You have to start at the bottom and do some weird stuff to start. There was this — I actually think they might still be around — it’s a production called Zoochosis. Discovery Channel was trying to start doing more online content, so they hired this production company to do kind of educational videos. But this guy was very, his name was Patrick [Scott] and he did very artistic type stuff.”
“I did a couple of things for him. Then they were doing a thing called Fail Lab, where it was like Mythbusters kind of. They did a lot of the challenges, like the cinnamon challenge and that kind of stuff … This is pre-Tide Pods [challenge]. So we did a whole show. Their season finale was doing these challenges and so I did a banana and Sprite challenge where I had to eat a banana and then chug a two-liter [bottle] of Sprite and I barfed everywhere into a bucket. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever done on camera. I look back and I’m like, ‘Why did I do that?'”
Monroe noted that the show broke down why the challenges were so difficult and why the chemicals in the respective products didn’t work together, resulting in her body’s negative reaction. Eventually, Monroe would leave Los Angeles, noting that the “vanity of the scene” proved to be too tiring for her.
“The stereotype of the people in Hollywood is true,” she said. I think wrestling can get that way, too. All in all, entertainment stems from that, right? It’s who you know, it’s who you can network with.”
“I think that the difference between wrestling and like the Hollywood scene for me at least, was people in wrestling are just a little bit more grounded. That wasn’t always true [in LA],” Monroe admitted. “I met plenty of, really awesome people, especially in the improv scene. I think with comedy, it was a little bit easier for me. Doing the auditions and stuff [though], it was like, if you don’t know anybody, you’re just another person at the call, you know what I mean?”
“You’re in there with a bunch of people that look like you, your insecurities are played on, you know, and then it’s just really hard and everyone tells you that. Everyone knows it’s hard, but once you experience it, you’re like, ‘Oh, I get it now,’ and theater was always like that, too. Even when I was auditioning for plays in college and in high school and everything, it’s politics.”
After leaving Los Angeles, “The Killer Bae” moved to Orlando, Florida for less than a year before settling into Chicago, where she currently resides in the middle of a booming professional wrestling scene.
