What was it like seeing yourself in all those WWE video games?
Surreal. I mean anytime you see your face in a different context it’s a little strange. The first action figure I saw I was in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and I walk into a Target and I had to grab a towel or something for the show that night and I went, “Oh, that’s me.” And I bought it. I bought myself and I’ll never forget it. I still got it.
The new WWE 13 game is all about the Attitude Era. Do you have a favorite memory from back in those days?
Oh, there’s so much stuff, you know. I think back to the stuff that Christian and I did and all the idiotic things that we did that were so much fun. You had two guys that grew up together and really do act like brothers and did play Sega Genesis together in college and we did do all of these things. Now we’re on worldwide TV living out our dream, getting to show a side of our personalities, which is essentially us. I mean everything we did every week. You know there’s not one particular thing that sticks out more than anything else because we had fun all the time.
How has the transition been for you from wrestling to acting on Haven?
There are similarities without a doubt, but some more minor differences. I really had to pull back a lot of things and reel in my facial expressions if I was doing something. I really sat down with the directors and said, “Okay, I have no idea what I’m doing.” My tendency is to go huge and over the top to translate something to someone 80,000 people away. It has to be larger than life. With this they know if you’ve got a nose hair. So you’ve really got to try and pull back all of those things that I was naturally inclined to do. That I found was kind of the biggest transition, but thankfully I worked with a bunch of different directors that each really helped me in a different way. They really helped me with trying to calm these things a little bit. It’s been a learning process, but not quite as crazy as I thought it was going to be.
Nick was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and lived there until the age of 18, when he decided to pack his flack jacket and move to New York City.
