Ninja Mack was recently interviewed by Wrestling Inc., where he spoke about joining Cirque Du Soleil:

“I saw a Cirque du Soleil tryout in Vegas, so I booked my ticket, put in my video that I sent out. You can find that on YouTube on one of my old pages. They didn’t take me either,” he admitted. “They showed up, you pay for the tryout, I did the tryout. I got a phone call, ‘you’re really good, but you don’t know how to dance, you can’t get across the stage. You can do all the badass s**t, but you weren’t very fluent or agile for us. Can you try out again or can you get some experience in that?’

“Go home for the summer and I end up taking some ballet, some tap, some jazz, just to literally pick up some little stuff to learn how to move across the stage. At the end of the summer, I flew myself back, tried out, and got into the Cirque du Soleil program.”

On working at Cirque Du Soleil:

“Like the WWE, the Cirque du Soleil, you get in and you can apply for jobs, but they have indie circuses too like Seaworld has jobs, there are so many different circuses. San Diego Productions out in California gave me my first opportunity. So, I got into the Cirque du Soliel program, as you meet people I got a six-week job in Mexico, so that was a quick tour. I then did the Michael Jackson workshop in Montreal for Cirque du Soleil. They used me like a guinea pig. I sat in a cannon and they shot my 80 feet in the air on a trapeze. They just said to, ‘hold on, let go, and fall down into a 40-foot net.’ That was a wild six weeks in Montreal.”

On the similarities between the circus and wrestling worlds:

“If you get into the program like every show has different acts. So if you were to look at every match on a card, you could compare that to an act on a show. So sometimes cards have 8 to 12 acts, some acts are 30 minutes, some are eight minutes, just like matches.”