Luke Hawx Talks In Depth About Chris Kanyon, His WWE Stint & More

Luke Hawx was a guest on Busted Open Radio, where he spoke about his friendship with Chris Kanyon, as well as Kanyon's struggles with his mental health.

“When Hurricane Katrina hit here in 2005, Kanyon was the first guy to reach out to me and say, ‘hey, if you need anything, you call me,'” “And this is in the middle of his troubles, he was struggling hard at this point. But he said, ‘look, I’ve got some extra space in my condo at Clearwater Beach. If you need a place to stay, don’t you hesitate to come stay here.’ My ex-wife, my children’s mother, she had family about twenty minutes away from Kanyon’s. So I said, ‘that’s kind of perfect. You can go stay there, I can stay with Kanyon, and we can still do the family stuff and I can see the kids.’ We didn’t know how long it was going to take to get back into our homes after Katrina, which obviously, it took damn near a year. But I was thankful because Kanyon took me in and he put me up. He wasn’t doing good mentally at the time. He was really struggling. That’s what I talked about on Dark Side of the Ring, where he was having these hallucinations where he would stay up for three, four days at the time. And he would say he left the house and see aliens, and he had to break into the Scientology center that was ten minutes away.”

“We had to physically hold him down a few times so he didn’t leave the house, because we were scared he was going to get in trouble. And it was crazy, because it’s tough to see such a good person and someone you care about dearly just completely off the wagon. And he wasn’t on any drugs or anything. It was his mind screwing with him, which is even crazier. Because you know if you see somebody drinking, or someone taking pills, or doing drugs, you go, ‘oh, they’re screwed up. They’re high as a kite.’ You don’t really forgive the behavior, you just don’t like when people do those certain substances.”

“With Kanyon, he didn’t have to do anything. He would go from being completely normal, completely fine to having good conversations, spending the day hanging out, working out on the beach, to that night, being in manic mode. He’d start talking crazy and saying gibberish and being off the wall. You just didn’t know how to react. That was kind of new to me because I had never dealt with a person with those personalities before, personally, on a day to day basis. It was tough to see someone who you cared about deeply and someone who was such a good person really struggle mentally.”

He spoke about Kanyon's closeted homosexuality, which was the topic of a recent episode of Dark Side of the Ring.

“He hid it well.” “He only really only opened up to his close, close friends, ’cause he knew something was wrong. He’d tell me all the time, he’d go, ‘I’m f*****g crazy. I’m f*****g crazy.’ He would make up these things. I think part of it, and look, I could be completely wrong, but I said this on Dark Side of the Ring as well, and I hope I don’t get chastised for this online, but I’m going to say it anyway because I think people need to know. He was in the closest for so long, he did so many things that screwed with him. And the people who was close to him did not care. But he often told me, in his exact words, ‘everybody hates me because I’m a f****t. Nobody likes me because I’m a f****t.’ I would say, ‘you’ve got to stop saying that because that’s not true. You’re not even open to half the world or 75% of the people that you know. You’ve only opened up to your close friends, which is fine. You don’t have to put it out there.’”

“He would tell me these weird stories. He’d go, ‘man, you wouldn’t believe what I would have to deal with. I would feel like this guy was on to my trail, so I’d go out to a bar with that guy and hook up with a chick and purposely take her back to the hotel and force myself to have sex with her to prove to make this guy think that I’m not gay.’ I’d go, ‘dude, that’s deep. When you’re going to that level to hide your real identity?’ You’ve got to think he did this from such a young age. By this point, he had been dealing with this for the majority of his life, so the way he perceived himself and the way that he thought others perceived him really ate him up.”

“And no matter how much love myself, or Shane Helms, or any of his close friends that spoke to him on the regular – Double J, Jackie, John Johnson who passed away a few years ago, a super fan, that was one of Kanyon’s close friends. They talked almost every day. Now, Jackie had his substance abuse problems, which was drinking. Kanyon didn’t have substance abuse problems. Kanyon’s problems were just his head, so it was difficult, really, to watch somebody that I was so close with and I’d seen that really cared about wrestling, and not just wrestling but cared about a lot people that were involved in wrestling, just drive himself off the edge. That was hard to watch, especially in person.”

Hawx credits Vampiro with getting him into the film industry.

“Vampiro got me in the film business in 2006.” “Vampiro was shooting a film in Mexico, and we were filming Wrestling Society X in Los Angeles for MTV at the time. And Vamp asked me to come down and do his film in Mexico. I met his directors and producers at the show, and they liked me. And I thought they were full of crap. Hollywood is so full of crap. Everybody is doing something, and they’re going to use you, and they’re going to put you on, and they see something in you. So I take everything with a grain of salt. When you’re young in your career, you believe everything you hear. But at that point in my career, I didn’t think anything was going to happen as far as filming goes.”

“A few months after we finished the tapings of WSX, I got a call from Vamp’s producers and they said, ‘hey, we want to shoot these days and we want to fly you down for Mexico. We’ll fly you first class.’ They initially told me, ‘we’ll have you there for a week and we’re going to pay you $1,000 a day.’ At that point in my life, I had never been paid $1,000 a day before. We’re talking 2006, I was in my 20’s. Man, that was huge for me because it got my foot in the film industry.”

“I thought I knew everything, right? I was like, ‘I’m fighting, I’m talking. This is easy. I can do this because I wrestle.’ But it wasn’t easy I came to find out. Once I watched the footage back, I really wasn’t happy with it. My wrestling side of things didn’t transition over to the film side of things. I’m a realistic guy, I’m always willing to go back to the well and learn some more. So once I had seen my film with that production, I was not happy. I wasn’t happy at all, and I said ‘I had to learn more.’ So I started doing research on some schools to learn stunt business and acting, and I started taking some classes. I went and took two years of classes in stunts over here in Covington, Louisiana with a stunt coordinator named named Phil O’Dell, and just started working my way up the ranks.”

“It’s an every day battle, it’s an every day hustle. I’m always trying to learn more, I’m always trying to perfect my skills. No matter if its fire burns, shooting, driving, rappelling, high falls, I always train, train, train, just like in wrestling. You can’t just go in there and have a match, you have to prep for your matches. You can’t take six months off from wrestling and get back in the ring. Some people do, and usually, they look like crap. I didn’t want to look like crap, so I started studying and training as much as I can.”

Hawx finally spoke about how he wasn't really utilized in WWE.

“I’m still doing that to this day.” “I’m always trying to pick up as much as I can. And I think part of that is just grinding for so long. I got opportunities early on. I got big opportunities with XPW, when I started working with WWE doing dark matches and stuff like that in the early 2003’s, when I teamed with Kanyon my first time out there as the Mortis character. I wanted it, I wanted it and I wanted it, and I never really got that shot that I wanted. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it. I had to sit back and I had to look in the mirror and say ‘what was I missing?’ I could put on size, I could work on this, I could work on fundamentals. And back then, a lot of guys didn’t tell you what you were missing or what to work on. They would just tell you ‘good job’ or if you did something good. And there’s two sides to that story. Back then there wasn’t as many spots as there are today, or as many opportunities as there are today, so people were protecting their spots.”

“But on the other hand, there were so many egos from young guys that didn’t want to be told what to do, and a veteran would come in and tell the guys ‘hey, work on this. Work on that.’ And the guy would go ‘okay, sure’ and then blow them off. So, I see both sides of things. For me, I wanted to keep grinding and I wanted more success. So I was doing as many things as possible to be successful. And unfortunately, that leads to my next topic.”

“I see so many young guys now get so much opportunity so quick. And the next thing you know, they’ve been wrestling two or three years and they get signed, and then they get released a year later. Then they say they’re retired, then they come back, go with this company, then that company releases them and they retire again. And it’s like ‘you’re retired? You’ve only been wrestling three years. Put some f*****g work in, man. Put some work in.’ I’m not dissing anybody, I’m just saying I’m really appreciative of blooming late in my career. I think too much success too soon is a recipe for disaster.”