In the first of an exclusive three-part interview, Ben Smith goes to the London School of Lucha Libre in Bethnal Green and talks to Greg Burridge – who grew up in East London, as a youngster worked on his family’s famous London flower market on Columbia Road – and went on to become a professional wrestler, wrestling trainer, actor, stuntman, and fight director. His new film ‘London Rampage’ is out soon.
You’re very much an all-round entertainer now – wrestler, film maker, director, actor – it would seem as though you’re motivated to be the best at absolutely everything.
I guess so, yeah. Wrestling has opened up so many doors for me – doors that maybe would not have been opened if I didn’t pursue that avenue. But I knew if I was going to be a wrestler, I was going to be the best. Everyone said I wasn’t going to be a wrestler, and I used that as motivation to basically stick it up their a**e. I kind of became one of the best in Europe.
My other dream was to be an actor, and move into the movie industry. I had exactly the same thing, everybody told me: ‘You can’t make a movie.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, watch me’ – the more you tell me I can’t, the more I’m going to prove I can.
Did the desire to be an actor come at the same time as the desire to be a wrestler or did that come once you’d conquered wrestling?
I run the London School of Lucha Libre with Garry Vanderhorne – we are the best, most successful wrestling school in Europe, because we come at wrestling from a different angle. Wrestling is an art form, number one, and wrestlers need to understand that you’re learning an art form that you can transition and take into any other walk of industry.
I don’t like to think we are teaching the art of wrestling just to be done inside the wrestling ring. My mantra is we can train you to be a performer – we can take the art of wrestling into comedy, movies, theatre, stuntwork, it is all the same energy.
I don’t train wrestlers, I train all-round performers, guys that I can put in the ring on a Lucha Britannia show, but I can also use in my stunt team, or take on a movie set, and use as a stuntman there, or an actor. We have got a couple of wrestlers that do stand-up cabaret acts around London. They wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that if they hadn’t have come and trained at the London School of Lucha Libre.
The motivation you have to do that – is that from the likes of Rock, Hogan, Austin, proving that a lot of things like that can be done?
Yeah, totally. I just didn’t wanna be a wrestler. You say people like The Rock, my kind of inspiration to do this was Pat Roach. I always said: ‘I want to be a modern day Pat Roach.’ He was in Indiana Jones, loads of James Bond movies, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, he’s a huge name. He helped put British wrestling on the map, and I’m coming towards the end of my career now as a professional wrestler, and I can do more for wrestling by not being a performer inside the ring. Part of my mission is to make people subliminally know about or watch wrestling.
What were some of the other things that gave you the idea for this London Rampage project?
When we were originally in Thailand – we were wrestling – there was a movie that came out at the time, it was 2004, a movie called Ong-bak with Tony Jaa – an amazing performer. We were doing TV spots around Bangkok, and one of the stars of the movie was a big comedian. So basically they offered us parts in an upcoming project – we didn’t know what it was at the time – and we were too big for our boots and we upset the wrong people in Thailand, it all fell through. Anyway, we found out the movie that we could have been involved in was Tom-Yum-Goong, and that was the sequel to Ong-bak – I was absolutely gutted.
While I was in Thailand I kind of fell in love with the Thai martial art movies style, and, I really desperately wanted to be part of that world somehow. I tried really hard to get into the stunt industry whilst there and using my tool of wrestling – trying to be different. Nothing came of it, so then it got me hooked on the bug of action movies. When I came home to England, I wanted to learn a bit more about movies, and it was definitely an avenue I wanted to pursue – I’ve always wanted to follow the roots of Pat Roach.
One of my trainers – Tony Scarlo – was on an extras agency called Ray Knights and he hooked me up with the agency. Because I was a wrestler they took me on straight away because – as I found out – they want people that can do their own stunts. They don’t want to get stuntmen in; it’s too much money. If they can get us to fall around at a fraction of the price, they will do it. So I was getting a lot of work for Ray Knights doing stunts. It was good for me because I was learning the industry. I came in from the outside, I started doing low budget British action movies with people – learning the trade, asking questions, and trying to take in as much knowledge as I could.
I also did bodyguard work for Kylie Minogue, and Billie Piper on set for ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’. It was the best training I could have possibly got, because I learnt on set how to make a movie. They gave me a radio – Billie Piper didn’t need looking after – I sat there for 12 hours doing nothing. I had a radio, and I was listening to the director, the grips, the producer. I had a front row seat, and a radio, and basically commentary on how to make a movie. I did eight weeks of that, and I’d pretty much learnt how to make a movie – I haven’t been to film school.
I had the idea to make the movie, and I met another guy called Malcolm Martin who made a movie called Sucker Punch – a successful low budget British movie. And I just said to him, ‘How did you make this movie?’ And he said, ‘I looked what I had available to me, and I wrote a movie around that,’ so I started going, ‘Why don’t I just f**king make my own movie?’ Because I know how to make a movie, it can’t be that hard surely, so that was it; I was going to make my own movie.
You made the short film first – The Cockney Crusader – that was a statement to up-and-coming wrestlers, is this film going down that same route or is it a separate project?
That short movie got a lot of interest. I wanted to test my abilities with filmmaking, and it was a test to see if other people are going to like what I do. It’s really important; I wasn’t sure how the public were going to take to it – and they loved it. It was a compliment to me to say I actually can make movies, which was good.
So then you thought there was nothing holding you back to go for a full two-hour feature film?
Yeah, pretty much. I don’t believe in making short movies, I don’t see the point. So I thought, ‘f**k it I’ll just make a full-length feature.’
You’ve got this style ‘Grap fu’ – is that what we’re going to see in the film?
Yeah, going back to the Thailand thing – Ong-bak really put Muay Thai on the map. So I kind of realised that – I was doing these low budget English action movies as well, and they were doing this Chinese-style martial art and I thought, ‘Why are we trying to do a martial art that another country has perfected and doing a lot better than we do?’ – there’s not really a martial arts style that’s represented on the international movie scale that is British.
So I thought what I do, and what I train, and how I train – I was training in the old traditional ‘World of Sport’ style but also I modernised it maybe, a hybrid style of wrestling with Lucha Libre, American, Japanese. I thought if I was going to make a movie, I wanted to make a movie that if I went to HMV in Hong Kong, it would be ‘Martial Arts Movies – Japanese, Chinese, British’ and I wanted it to be the first British-style martial arts movie so I developed this fighting style that could easily be distinguished as ‘OK, it’s very British’ – a lot of gauges and locks, also with a lot of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) in there, Krav Maga styles, and of course wrestling – Lucha Libre being the main one.
What I realised as I developed the style is that a lot of things like Krav Maga – and all these fight techniques – are very similar to pro wrestling, so I started working on pro wrestling moves but instead of a hammerlock, what if he’s holding a knife? OK, so you come in with a knife and I hit him with a top wristlock, send him into an arm drag. That’s new, that’s not been done, that’s original.
So the main thing, I thought even if the movie is s**t, even if no one likes it, they’re going to say, ‘Well, it did martial arts and it was very unique and I’ve never seen that done before in that style,’ and that was my main aim. Especially with British wrestling, chain wrestling is a great art form and a great technique to learn, and what I did in the movie is a scene where the two guys are handcuffed and it’s basically chain wrestling whilst handcuffed in a fight. That’s not been done in any action movie before, so I developed this fight system around things that I know are going to be unique.
Check back soon for part two – where Burridge talks more about London Rampage, the wrestling business, and how Lucha Britannia is setting a new standard for wrestling schools in Britain.