David Dexter reports that Wade Barrett recently spoke with the Toledo Free Press. Check out the highlights:
On taking the Intercontinental Title belt around with him: “I’m the only guy responsible for taking that everywhere. So, if I forget it or if I lose it — it’s big trouble, really…It’s very heavy to be carrying around in my hand luggage, and I can’t be putting it in my main luggage that goes in the hold on the plane, because those things get lost occasionally, or it might get stolen out of there. So I have to keep it on my person at all times. Or when you’re going through the security belt at the airport or stuff like that, people always want to take it out of the bag, going ‘Oh, what’s this giant metal thing you’ve got in your bag?'”
On his elbow dislocation on RAW last year: “It was a pretty nasty injury. I got it in February 2012, and it took the wind out of my sails with regard to the run-up to WrestleMania last year. It was a very disappointing time, if you get injured. And the diagnosis was it was probably going to take six months to recover from that.”
On his recovery from the injury and surgery: “It’s a very slow process. And obviously with something like wrestling, where you’re constantly jumping around and getting slammed and all that, people kicking it and things like that, it really needs to be 100 percent before you can get going again.”
On his work on Dead Man Down: “That kinda tied up two and a half months of my six-month injury. So that was a great experience to be a part of that. It had some great actors involved — Terrance Howard and Colin Farrell were both in the film; I was working very closely with them. And this was the first film, or acting role, I’ve been a part of, so it was a great experience.”
On his bare-knuckle fighter hype upon his return: “I really liked the vig-nettes that WWE put together; I thought those were really cool. We got a lot of good feedback from people saying it was like a Hollywood movie or something like that. I think it was kind of a chance to give me a little shift in the right direction when I came back and let people know I mean business.”
On the WWE locker room at the moment: “It’s pretty tense, actually. Especially for me, because I obviously missed last year’s WrestleMania because of the injury I got just beforehand. Everyone’s looking at the card, it’s really starting to take shape — I think we’ve got two or three matches that are kind of set for WrestleMania — and everyone’s looking at that card and thinking, ‘I’ve got to get myself on there pretty quickly,’ because unfortunately, there are limited spaces on the WrestleMania card. It’s not like everyone is going to get on there.”