Ask American Profile 10/26/2008

Maria Kanellis, Michael Madsen

Q I’m a big fan of TV wrestling. Do the WWE Divas on Raw, ECW and Smackdown! ever get injured—really injured? Or is it all for show?
—Maxine Holland, Canton, Ohio

There’s more than a dash of show business, certainly, in professional wrestling. But it’s nonetheless an extremely physical job. Maria Kanellis, 26, one of the current World Wrestling Entertainment “Divas,” or female wrestlers, found that out after her very first time in the Smackdown! ring. “I got smacked so hard it knocked one of my fillings out,” she says. The former beauty-contest queen entered the WWE Diva Search, a national competition to find the next female wrestling talent, in 2004. She didn’t win, but the WWE hired her anyway as an announcer and groomed her to compete. Now she’s set her sights on the Smackdown! female championship title—all the while working on launching her singing career and her own line of designer clothing.

Q Does actor Michael Madsen always play bad guys? It sure seems like it.
—Leslie Olsen, Amble, Mich.

Madsen, 50, the brother of actress Virginia Madsen, has portrayed a variety of characters in more than 150 TV and movie roles. He admits he’s often been cast as a “heavy” after playing a memorably sadistic cop torturer in 1992’s Reservoir Dogs—a trend that continues with his part in the recent movie Hell Ride. Still, he’s trying to rise above the stereotype. In Strength and Honor, an independent film that’s been getting rave reviews on the festival circuit, he plays a Rocky-esque boxer in a fight to save the life of his dying son. “It’s a fine story and not like anything I’ve done before,” he says. “I finally got a chance to do something heroic.”

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