TWoLL: The Making of a Character

CMLL has lucha trainers; I think we’ve all heard about how even the top guys are expected to take training sessions on a weekly basis. What I didn’t know is that CMLL’s training goes beyond the execution and practice of keys. Again, from The World of Lucha Libre:

The transition from athlete to athlete-actor can be difficult for many wrestlers. In the early 1990s, partially in response to the new competition from the AAA, the EMLL went so far as to contract a drama teacher to coach some of their more promising wrestlers. According to the drama coach, Roberto Herrera, the wrestlers face a variety of problems moving from the gym to the arena. Some are very good in the ring but freeze when confronted with a microphone. Others are good at engaging with their opponents but don’t know how to engage with the audience. For many wrestlers, however, the main problem is in connecting themselves with the character that they have been contracted to play.

In those cases, part of the work is to invent some sort of background, even if it is primarily an emotional background, for the character. For example, if the wrestler’s character is demonic, he has them read the Inferno and Faust. He suggested that the wrestler Mephisto claim Faust’s demon as his great-great-grandfather. For another wrestler, named after a type of fighter jet, he organized an excursion to a museum to view the airplane. If the wrestler’s character is supposed to be enigmatic but the wrestler has a regional accent, he works as a dialect coach. In addition, he works with the wrestlers to develop a biography for the characters to use in interviews as well as in the ring. His services, however, are only provided to a small number of wrestlers who the EMLL management has decided to cultivate.

(page 80)

Unlike most of the first hand interviews in this book (which are listed from the late 90s to 2001), those attributed to Roberto Herrera are listed as 2006. With that year in mind, the fighter jet named wrestler would appear to be Stuka Jr. (unless someone can think of another one.) Given Herrera’s time with the company and role, he surely had a hand in the image building of Mistico his look and his back story.

My joke, when I brought this part up to others in email previously, was Leono clearly was sent to a zoo one day to observe a lion, but the lion was tired that day, just laid there and Leono thought that was the way to go. No one’s ever found that joke funny.

But you can expand joke from there, if you’d like – what exactly is Mascara Purpura thinking about? Did they just give Flash a stack of trade paperbooks (and if so, which Flash is his favorite?)