Stephen Amell (@stephenamell) is an actor best known for his roles in “Arrow” and “Heels.” He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, Ca to talk about “Heels” coming to Netflix on September 15th, how he was cast for the role of Jack Spade in the show, CM Punk and AJ Lee starring in the show and being potentially responsible for Punk’s return to wrestling, whether or not he thinks there will be a third season, his match at SummerSlam 2015 teaming with Neville to defeat Wade Barrett and Stardust, if he thinks there is more to tell with the Cody Rhodes story, his match against Christopher Daniels at the first-ever All In show in 2018 and more!
Quote I’m thinking about: “Your life is right now! It’s not later! It’s not in that time of retirement. It’s not when the lover gets here. It’s not when you’ve moved into the new house. It’s not when you get the better job. Your life is right now. It will always be right now. You might as well decide to start enjoying your life right now, because it’s not ever going to get better than right now-until it gets better right now!” – Abraham Hicks
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On Heels debuting on Netflix:
“If you are a wrestling fan, Netflix is the place for you right now. We got Heels, which is 16 episodes, I counted it as one season. The way that I actually think about it is, do you remember in the Andre The Giant documentary, when they were saying that for the purposes of WrestleMania III Hulk and Andre had never wrestled, right? But in actuality, they had wrestled each other all over the country, like hundreds of times. God bless our original network, but as far as I’m concerned, Heels debuts on September 15.”
On why he thinks Heels is one season:
“I mean, there is literally no time cut between episode 8 and episode 9, which would have been 101 to 201. It ends with the big match at the State Fair and the surprise ending. And the next episode picks up basically, with Alexander Ludwig, who plays My brother just walking out of the ring, direct cut.”
On being the perfect casting choice:
“So it’s my understanding that they tried to put the show together in 2017, maybe even earlier than that, and they couldn’t cast it. They couldn’t find the brothers. Then the project came back around in 2019 and it was an offer that went out to someone that wasn’t me, and from my understanding when the network said who they put up the offer to, the feedback that they kept getting was, did Steven Amell pass? Eventually, it came around. But it was really funny, man, because I was finishing up Arrow, and I think we had, like, maybe five or six episodes to go, and I was very, very specific with my manager. I was like, A) I’m taking a break from television. B) I’m not entering into another six-year contract right away. And C) I really don’t want to do anything particularly physical. Then my manager calls me up, and he’s like, listen, an offer is coming on this one. It’s going to be an excellent offer. Here’s the script, and I want you to hop on the phone with Michael Malley, who was our showrunner on Heels. I sit down and I read the script in about four pages, and I go, Oh, motherf*cker. This is obviously a yes. It was a yes right away. Five pages into the script, I was like, I obviously have to do this. And, yeah, the rest is history.”
On his experience in the ring translating to Heels:
“Under no circumstances should I ever have attempted that, we could have cut around it in a variety of different ways. I do not have luck with the coast-to-coast. The only one that I’ve ever done where I haven’t hurt myself was the first take, which ironically we definitely ended up using. But when I did the coast-to-coast at All In, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I figured, okay, I don’t want to smack the back of my head, so at the last minute, I’m gonna bail out and try to just land on my left butt. We finished the match, and I’m back in there in the locker room, and I can’t figure out, it feels like someone’s put a tennis ball underneath my left hip. And actually got a text from The Big Show, and he goes that coast to coast looked pretty stiff, I think maybe it might have been. Anyway, I fractured my hip. I had to go right back to filming Arrow on like the Tuesday after this long weekend, and I definitely didn’t ask permission to go to a wrestling match, so I had to sit everyone down and go, I’m not to be treated any differently. I am fine. My hip hurts. I can’t make it worse. I can just slow down the healing process. But that also turned out to be the episode that had the most amount of stunts in the history of the show. And the first thing that I had to do on my first day back was go into this dead sprint and then slide under a door. And as I’m sprinting, I can just hear tearing in my hip. It was horrendous.
On his match at All In:
“First of all, Christopher Daniels just couldn’t have been a nicer guy. Was so helpful with me in the ring. I agreed to do it, but the only way that I would agree to do it is if I lost clean. Because I don’t think people ever do that in the celebrity matches. So I was like, Listen, I want to equip myself really well. I want to tell an actual story. But I want to get one of those, 1, 2 oh! But then I want to lose straight up. And CD was like, Absolutely not, no way, absolutely no way. And I said, Chris, I’m not doing it unless you go over clean, and we can shake hands at the end and then I get to have my moment. I felt like also that’s the way that you get respect in the industry. You go in there, you change with the boys, and it’s like, no, I’m gonna lose clean. But no, he took care of me in that match, because there’s so much adrenaline. So what inevitably happens is you forget to breathe. Straight up, you will go through some sort of sequence in the ring, and you’ll forget to breathe, which leads to you blowing up. I think three minutes into that match I grabbed him, I’m like, we need to go home. He went, shut the f*ck up. Don’t even move. I’ll take care of you. And he did. Yeah, he was great.”
On his match at SummerSlam 2015:
“Well, I mean, first of all, I wouldn’t recommend to anybody to have their first match at a Premium Live Event in f*cking Brooklyn. They’re like Hey, listen, this crowd is not going to be the easiest and the one thing that you can’t mentally prepare for. First of all, I came out, I was so nervous that I forgot to get in the ring. If you go back and watch the match, Cody was like, you forgot to get in the ring because he was going to powder out and do all that stuff. First of all, I went and trained with Cody. [How long did you train for?] I went on a loop with them. They were on Vancouver Island. So I went to that show, and then they were in Vancouver the next day. Cody and I had dinner that night with Brandi and my wife Cass and then I went down to Everett with them again. That’s when we did the run-in, where he face washes me, and then I come into the ring. I was the guest host at Raw, so I had to sit in the crowd for the entire show and this didn’t happen until hour three. We had practiced this, and the agent that we had was Road Dogg, an awesome guy. I was like Cody’s gonna face wash me and then I want to jump up onto the apron and then sort of like whip myself over the ropes into the ring. Road Dogg was like, No, you can’t, you gotta slide under the bottom rope. And I’m like, I don’t want to slide under the bottom rope. I want this to be dynamic, I want to jump up onto the apron. And he goes, okay, but just so you know, if you miss and you stumble, there will be no match at SummerSlam because you will have lost the fans forever. They want to hate you. They don’t want to like you. Okay? You’re just some actor that’s taking away a spot. So it’s like, you’re welcome to jump, but if you miss… So about an hour and a half into the show I realized, Oh, my God, we’ve practiced this a bunch, but I was practicing it in shorts and now I’m wearing dress pants, am I going to be able to do this? So, there’s probably someone who saw me walking around the back of that arena jumping in my dress pants to make sure that they weren’t going to rip. Once I got into the match, it was good, but we decided that we were gonna start the match off with Cody springboarding into the ring, and then me springboarding as well. He’s like, Oh my God, holy smokes. I was terrified of messing up the springboard, I practiced it 100 times. But I even said to him right before the match. I go, do we have to start with the springboard? And he was very, very accommodating and really, just kind of let me do what I want. But he goes, Yeah, we’ve got to do the springboard.”
On if Heels season 3 is possible:
“I think that season three is a possibility. People are gonna have to watch it on Netflix. It’s gonna have to line up schedule-wise for me because I now have another job that’s in first position. But listen, without trying to spoil it, we didn’t want to send my character out quite literally on his back. There was always the idea that we would tell more of a story. I think there’s more to be told. I think that in the way that there’s no real season one and season two, because eight and nine really line up. I think that if we did come back, you might see a little bit of a time jump. That’s sort of what the showrunner has pitched.”
On there being more to be told with his Cody Rhodes story:
“I hope so. Yeah, I really hope so. First of all, I could not be prouder of that guy. To do what he did, to walk away. I don’t want to speak for him too much. But I really do think that after our match at SummerSlam, because I remember it was like Neville pinned King Barrett, and then they did the camera thing where Cody’s walking out of the ring they got the camera on him, and they got the camera on me, which is the sign, the universal sign in wrestling of we’re not done, we have unfinished business. So the plan was, as best I can recall, was there was a pay-per-view after SummerSlam, and then the October pay-per-view was going to be in LA at Crypto Arena. Cody and I were supposed to have a cage match. We were getting ready to send a ring up to Vancouver for me to do a bunch more training, because I basically faked my way through the SummerSlam match, I could still probably take you through the beats of it right now. So the plan was to actually go more the length I went with Christopher Daniels, like 12-15, minutes. And again, the plan was to lose clean. Then all of a sudden, Cody just calls me up, and he goes, Look, man, I don’t know what’s going on, but our match just got shelved, and no one will give me an explanation why. I am devastated, and I’m deeply embarrassed. I was like, Look man, it’s okay. But I really think that was one of the contributing factors to him leaving.
On Peacemaker’s insult at Arrow:
“That was a little unnecessary. I didn’t f*cking appreciate that at all. Okay, I’m just gonna come right out and say this. Between the movies and between Peacemaker, a little bit like, our show was kind of treated like sh*t. I get it, we’re on the CW, I get it. It’s TV. But I also get the fact that when people think about the most recent iteration of DC, okay, they don’t think about the Snyder cut. They think about the Arrowverse, and we got crapped on for years and years and years, and this just seemed excessive. Again, I’m not actually mad, but like, just remember hearing that and being like f*ck those guys! Seriously. I’m up here, I’m working just as hard as anyone else. You know how hard it is to play a superhero with no superpowers for 23 episodes a year? It’s really, really, really hard. I’m not looking for a prize, but maybe don’t sh*t on our show.”
On meeting John Cena:
“I’ve met John a handful of times. There couldn’t be a nicer, more genuine person. If I should be mad at anyone, should be James Gunn for writing that in the first place. But he could not be a nicer guy. He’s such a good guy. It’s not a personal vendetta against him.”
On being part of The Bullet Club and his ROH match:
“We had set up a great spot with me and Kenny where we hit the Hart Foundation’s final move, the clothesline, and we’re supposed to go back down and then we were supposed to wait. Now I’m supposed to wait for Kenny’s call, we were both supposed to kip up at the same time and then celebrate in the ring the way that he does. I was so excited that I kipped up immediately, didn’t wait for him. That I think that is the hardest thing to do in the ring. The hardest thing to do in the ring is to slow down. Right before my first match, Hunter came up to me and he went, listen, when you get out there, slow everything down. Then when you are positive that you’re going too slow, slow it down. And then when you think there is no chance in the world that you can go any slower, slow it down. I think back to kipping up when I should have waited for Kenny, or when I went through the table in a match against Christopher Daniels, like I could have taken 20 seconds to climb those ropes and really let the crowd stand up and let everything build. I did the whole thing in like 2 seconds. Didn’t even have time for the for the announcer. He just went, ‘Steven Amell, what are you doing?!’ Although that didn’t hurt at all.”
On Heels leading to a CM Punk return:
“So Phil wasn’t originally in that part. We had shot a bunch of stuff with a different actor playing Ricky Rabies. But then with everything that went down with the pandemic, they had to bow out. So we got Phil in, and he was great, just a great guy to work with, good actor and I stand by my match that I had with him. It was a lot of fun. And if that’s 5% of the reason could be that we got him back in back in the business, then I’m good with that.”
What is Stephen Amell grateful for?
“Healthy kids, my wife and that I have had wonderful people to work with.”
