James Harrison flipped backward out of the wrestling ring after getting punched in the face. But, of course, he landed on his feet. He’d had practice.
He didn’t really get punched in the face. Sure, he took a blow, but not one meant to injure. It was just one that was meant to look like it hurt. Harrison was on the set for the STARZ show, Heels, in which Harrison played an amateur wrestler name Apocalypse. The beauty of amateur wrestling — and, more specifically, acting as an amateur wrestler for TV — is that it’s nothing like football, according to Harrison.
“It’s still way harder to be a professional football player than it is to be a professional wrestler, because the person that I’m wrestling with is helping me do the things that I’m trying to do against them,” Harrison said by phone. “They’re actually helping me to do that and we’re trying to do that as safe as possible and as (painless) as possible. Whereas, when I’m playing NFL football, this guy is not trying to help me with nothing. He’s fighting with every ounce of his being to not let me get my job done, just like I’m fighting with him so he can’t get his job done.”
In the NFL, players are sometimes trying to hurt each other. When they get hurt, they can’t show it — it’s another form of acting, in a way.
“Yeah, we’re the opposite. (In wrestling), we’re trying to make it look like it hurt, even though it doesn’t,” Harrison said.
After 16 seasons in the NFL with the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers, Harrison retired with hopes of pursuing new challenges. He’d always hated being in front of cameras as a player, and decided to address his stage fright head-on by pursuing a career as a TV football analyst for FOX Sports. Eventually, he pursued acting by hiring an agent and an acting coach. After reading countless scripts for the camera, he drew interest from Starz. The role, he explained, was a natural fit.
“The character is a person that is almost like a big-brother type of figure and a guy in the locker room that everyone looks up to. So I’ve played that role. I did that in real life when I played with the Steelers,” Harrison said. “It was just a match of making your emotions fit whatever scene that you were in.”
The show is about two brothers running an amateur wrestling promotion in the small town of Duffy, Georgia. Harrison’s character is one of the members of that troop of wrestlers. And while Harrison found acting to be “easy” though “time-consuming,” he did not want people to get the wrong impression of wrestling.
“The only thing that’s fake about wrestling is that you know the outcome of that match. You still have to hit that mat,” he said. “You get those bumps and bruises before you get to that predetermined outcome. And that mat is not soft. It’s not forgiving. We had one of our co-stars — our lead Stephen Amell — he had a compound fracture of his spine in a stunt. He was out for six weeks.”
Stephen Amell hurt himself in the first day of shooting the wrestling scenes while trying a move called “coast to coast.” The actor overshot the stunt and broke his back, which did not require surgery — just a few weeks of rest. For the most part, however, the stunts are safe. The matches are far simpler for TV than they are in a live wrestling event for WWE. For Heels, they shot each match slowly, just a few moves at a time. They would repeat those moves until they looked just right — or the camera crew simply needed another angle. And then they’d progress.
The rigors of Harrison’s role are not solely physical. His character grapples with alcoholism during the show. And perhaps that depth could help Harrison prove he has potential to be more than a hulking and athletic supporting character. He said he hopes he showed enough promise to land more gigs in the acting world.
One thing is for certain, his football days are finished. He rarely watched football during the 2020 season. He was instead engrossed in the filming of the show during the fall. Even with a commentary job on FOX, he found he barely had time to watch. Some NFL players find retirement difficult. They struggled with their mental health. Harrison seems at peace — he’s certainly stayed busy.
“I think guys who can’t — and a lot of guys have trouble coping with it at first — but I think that’s because a lot of guys don’t get to leave the game when they think they’re done,” Harrison said. “They feel like they had more time or they could’ve played longer or they wanted to play longer. I played 15 years. … It was long enough. … That’s just one chapter. I’m onto the next one.”