Kurt Angle: ‘The Rock has done so much for my career’
Kurt Angle praised The Rock during a recent interview, mentioning that it’s “really cool” he plays Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine.
During an interview with Sports Illustrated, Angle spoke about how when he first got to WWE, Rock made sure Angle know he was accepted.
Angle said:
“The cool thing about him is he was really giving. I was an Olympic gold medalist, it wasn’t like I was a nobody coming into WWE but when you go in there with an ego you’re going to get in trouble very quickly. So I never had that ego and I always felt that these stars that I was going to wrestle like The Rock and Stone Cold, I put them at a higher level above me. But Dwayne always brought me up to that level and said, ‘Hey, you’re with us. You’re up here with us. You’re not down there with the rest.'”
He continued:
“He was always very generous with the way he wrestled. He was my first world championship match where I won the world championship. He didn’t have to say yes, but he did. So I’m just very grateful. I think The Rock has done so much for my career and I’m so grateful that he’s in the movie The Smashing Machine, that he played Mark Kerr. It’s all coming back, it’s going full circle and I think that’s really cool that he’s playing my biggest nemesis Mark Kerr.”
Angle defeated The Rock at No Mercy on October 22, 2000 to win his first world championship. Rock won it back from him that February at No Way Out. In total, they wrestled against each other on 7 pay-per-views between 2000 and 2002.
Also during the interview, Angle gave an update on the movie being written about his life, saying that the script is just about finished.
“We’re almost done with the script. We already got the investors, so we’re in a good position right now,” Angle said.
In a previous interview on Talk is Jericho, Angle noted that the film will cover the story of his Olympic gold medal win in 1996. The project will be directed by the Nelms brothers, who directed Red Right Hand (2024) and Fatman (2020).
The full interview is available below:
Ian Carey is a writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, whose work has been featured in NOW Magazine, The Huffington Post, and more. A lifelong wrestling aficionado born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he has covered the industry for a decade and a half. He joined the f4wonline.com team in 2019.