Adam Copeland is known to the sports entertainment community as WWE superstar “Edge.” He’s a beloved wrestler who was forced to retire from ring action because of a serious neck injury. However, Copeland has found success as an actor, spending four years as Dwight Hendrickson on SyFy’s supernatural TV series Haven. Now, he plays Lucas Nolan in the movie Interrogation, an upcoming action thriller film directed by Stephen Reynolds, which also stars C.J. Perry, known as the WWE superstar Lana. The film is the 3rd installment in the Action Six Pack series of films.
“What I liked about the script is that there was a lot of layers to Nolan,” says Copeland. “It wasn’t just a guy who shoots a gun and fights a lot. There’s more to it. He interrogates people and he has to think on his toes a lot, which is a lot of fun to tackle as a performer, because it’s heavily involved dialogue, and that was really kind of the thing for me that I looked at as a challenge.
With his role on Haven, Copeland says that he had five years to fully understand his character, but Interrogation was filmed in only 11 days. “It’s crazy when I look back on it and how much we got accomplished in that little time,” he says. “Even with The Edge and Christian Show, we did 3 episodes in 3 days and that, I mean, that’s ridiculous — 90 minutes of content for TV in 3 days. We quickly realized after those 3 episodes, we shouldn’t do that. We need more time. You know, with Haven we had 2 weeks an episode. Now with Vikings, we have a month per episode.”
On Vikings, Copeland will play warrior Ketill Flatnose.
Interrogation is produced by WWE Studios Inc., a subsidiary which was created in 2002 to develop and produce feature film properties for its wrestlers and personnel. Directing the movie was Stephen Reynolds, known for a variety of tv and film projects, including Haven. “I was very unprepared when I did Bending the Rules in 2009,” says Copeland. “By the time I got to Haven, I had a little bit of experience, then I started taking acting classes while I was doing Haven.”
Adam Copeland says that it was his emotional WWE retirement speech that caught the attention of the producers from Haven. “They called the WWE, because they wanted a tie-in from SmackDown into Haven, because SmackDown led into Haven on Syfy at that point,” he says. “I guess a couple of the people who had never watched wrestling were crying by the end of it and said, ‘we’ve got to get this guy.” A week later, I was in Nova Scotia.”
Acting wasn’t something that was on Adam Copeland’s radar. “I really just planned on retiring, but within about 2 months, I was really bored and understood that I needed to do something creative, or I was going to be the insane guy on top of a mountain with a huge beard,” he says.
When they asked him to return for a second season, he said, “Yep I’m in . Do you need me to come up now and build some sets or something, because I’m really bored.”
Two seasons turned into five and Adam Copeland realized that he enjoyed acting, so he started taking acting classes.
With action movies comes stunts and even though Copeland had a stunt double, it wasn’t used. “I thought I’m not taking a German suplex, so I’ll be good. I had 3 days in order to learn about the fight scenes. The second fight scene I had was with this really big kid. He’s like 6’7”, 260. He’s a boxer up in Vancouver. We started, and we’re fighting over this gun, and he’s supposed to knee me in the ribs. Man, he kneed me so hard, and I just went, “Okay, all right. I’ve never been hit that hard in the ring. How am I going to get through this?” I drove down the California coast after that and I could barely breathe.”
Copeland’s found out that his rib was in his lung.
“I probably should have used the stunt double.”
Interrogation will be released on video on demand September 20th. For the entire interview, visit
