Mark William Calaway spent 30 years playing the supernatural force of wrestling destruction known as The Undertaker, until retiring in 2020. Now, after reprising his iconic persona for a new interactive Netflix film, some are speculating if he’s really stepped out of the ring for good.
ET’s Denny Directo recently spoke with the WWE icon via video chat, where he opened up about his new choose your own adventure-style interactive movie, Escape the Undertaker, and whether or not he’s truly retired for good.
“As of this moment, yeah, my days in the ring are done,” he shared. “And it’s not because I don’t want to be in the ring. I mean, that is where I’ve spent most of my adult life, my whole life really.”
“More than half of my life has been spent in the wrestling or sports entertainment ring, and so in my mind, I still can see everything, and in my heart, you know, I want to be out there,” he continued. “But it’s just at a point where my body can’t deliver what my mind and my heart see.”
Calaway, 56, said he doesn’t want “to cheapen the legacy of that character.”
“And I’d hate for people to pay money to see me work and be disappointed,” he added.
While Calaway may not be heading back to the ring any time soon, the longtime icon admitted that his 9-year-old daughter, Kaia, might have an interest in wrestling in the future — although he’s not exactly sold on the idea.
“Of all my kids, she’s probably the one that I need to keep the closest eye on from following in Daddy’s footsteps,” said Calaway — who shares Kaia with wife Michelle McCool, and is the father of two other daughters and a son from previous marriages.
“She knows the ins and outs and she could probably tell you more about today’s product than I can,” he said of his youngest daughter. “She’s really in tune with what’s going on.”
That being said, Calaway admitted that he wouldn’t necessarily stand in her way if it’s a dream she truly feels committed to.
“I mean if it’s in her heart, and that’s what she really truly wants to do, one day I’ll do my best to coach her up, obviously her mom will too. But we’ll see what happens,” he said. “We have a long way to go, before we are worried about that.”
In the meantime, Kaia has been having a great time watching her dad reprise his iconic character in Escape the Undertaker, in which Calaway plays the macabre character in a haunted house-style narrative, co-starring Big E, Kofi Kingston, and Xavier Woods, who make up the WWE wrestling trio The New Day.
According to Calaway, the biggest challenge to getting into character again was simply assembling the costume.
“First I had to find all the stuff! No pun intended, but it was dead and buried almost!” he recalled. “But it was a lot of fun.”
Calaway said he’d never heard of an interactive film before working on the project, but the concept left him “intrigued.”
“It was completely new to me, which is always fun, you know, being involved in something new and learning stuff,” Calaway shared. “[And] it was a really good time.”
Escape the Undertake is streaming now on Netflix.
