INTERVIEW: In wrestling and Hollywood, John Hennigan travels fast … try to keep up
Photo: John Hennigan stars in the sci-fi short The Speed of Time, available on Dust. Photo courtesy of Dust / Provided by Falco Ink with permission.
John Hennigan likes to call himself a storyteller. He tells these tales and crafts these narratives in both his acting work and his wrestling work with the WWE. His latest project is a short sci-fi film called The Speed of Time from writers Russ Nickel and William J. Stribling. It’s now available to stream on Dust.
The time-travel movie follows Johnny Killfire (Hennigan), a future police officer who must travel back in time and partner with … a younger version of himself (Sean Marquette). If the two Johnnys don’t succeed then the TimeBorgs will dominate the world with their new app that disrupts the space-time continuum. That means, gulp, pizzas may be delivered in the wrong time and place.
The 13-minute film is an irreverent journey into the genre tropes that populate many time-travel comedies, and Hennigan seems to be having a blast in the main role.
“William Stribling and Russ Nickel and I had been meeting regularly developing projects for years, and they’d written an action comedy feature that I loved,” Hennigan said in a recent phone interview. “We tried to find something to work on for a while unsuccessfully, and when I knew I was going to return to WWE, the three of us had coffee. And I said, ‘Hey, before I go back, we should really just make something. Let’s make a short. Let’s make something we can actually make instead of just writing comedy sketches and half-finished features. Let’s write something and make it. Otherwise we’re going to have spent all this time.’ I feel like the three of us are friends as opposed to just guys that talk about developing stuff because we all have a very similar sense of dark, quirky, irreverent humor, and we met a week later.”
At that second meeting, Nickel and Stribling pitched The Speed of Time, and Hennigan said he was blown away by the idea. He knew he could play this Johnny character, and he quickly signed on the dotted line for a movie that seemed inspired by Back to the Future and the Bill & Ted franchise. Hennigan also liked the opportunity to work alongside Marquette.
“Sean was amazing,” he said. “First of all, he is always positive, always super nice and friendly, always smiling. … He always lifts your spirits. … It’s obvious that he’s got a boatload of experience being on camera, on TV because he knows what to do. He knows how to hit his marks. He knows how to say his lines. He can take direction. He did a very good job of grounding my craziness because I was going for this maniacal, positive, crazy energy the entire time, and he grounded that. I think without him grounding it, we could have fallen quickly into absurdity. I’ve got to credit him for making The Speed of Time feel real, giving it heart.”
For those who watch Hennigan bodyslam his opponents on WWE, they may be surprised to find out that he has been dedicated to film for quite a long time. In fact, he was a film major at the University of California, Davis, where he made a feature-length film for his senior thesis. “I wrote, directed, produced, starred and edited a feature film called Point and Shoot that is not so bad it’s good; it’s just so bad that it’s horrible,” Hennigan said with a laugh.
Recently Hennigan has been able to scratch that acting itch because he took a break from WWE for several years. That said, he didn’t take a break from professional wrestling altogether; he still appeared on the indie circuit under a variety of names (he’s calling himself John Morrison nowadays). But at the same time he tried his best to develop his cinematic career.
“When I left WWE, did I have any hesitation or reservation about it? Yes and no,” he admitted. “I feel like I was extremely optimistic. I thought I was going to leave WWE for a year or two and make a sweet action movie that was going to play in a theater, and then I thought I’d make another movie or two or three and then maybe go back to WWE. But anyone who knows entertainment or Hollywood knows that’s not how it works. That’s not how filmmaking works. I made Boone: The Bounty Hunter. That ended up taking about five years from starting to write it to seeing it on Netflix.”
In addition to Boone, Hennigan also appeared in Legion of the Black, 20 Feet Below: The Darkness Descending and even Survivor on TV. He has watched himself on screen, but he tries to keep such viewings to a minimum.
“I’m a perfectionist, and I hate watching myself,” he said. “So it’s hard for me to watch it and not criticize everything and think of how I could have done things better. … I watch them all, but when I watch them back I am looking for things that I could have improved or fixed or said something slightly different or changed a line or my eyeline was off. My wife, for example, says she hates watching movies with me sometimes because I point out, oh you can see the tripod in the reflection on the stove. … I do that a lot, and she started doing it actually. When she does it now, she’s like, God dammit John, you’ve made me into a movie snob now, too.”
On the horizon for Hennigan are more movies and more appearances with WWE. He returned to the top wrestling company a couple months before the pandemic, after having been away for several years. He admitted to being somewhat nervous about the return. Would he be accepted again?
“When I left WWE, I was 90-100 percent positive that I was going to come back, and it was going to be great,” Hennigan said. “But as the years went by I started wondering, you know what I mean. Instead of saying, hey, I took two years off. It became, hey, I took eight years off. Hey guys I’d love to come back. Are you interested? … I was nervous that I had waited too long perhaps, but physically I don’t think that the people in the office or the WWE realized the kind of shape that I’m in now. I’m more physically capable now than I was in my previous run, which seems impossible. I never stopped wrestling. I wrestled Lucha Underground, AAA, Impact … all these independent scenes, and I trained really hard for movies like Boone, which means I was training with hardcore flips and martial arts tricks a couple days a week, too, in addition to weight training. So I feel like I improved myself. I was nervous that they weren’t going to know that, but now that I’m back, I feel like they do.”
Hennigan is back, in more ways than one.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Speed of Time, starring John Hennigan, is now available on Dust. Click here for more information.
