When the script for 'The Wrestler' kept coming to me I said, This movie is so good if you put me in the film as a wrestler people are going to say, 'No credibility, Hulk Hogan isn't a good actor,' whatever Hollywood thinks of me.

I'm real critical of myself and if I take the bandana off my head I'm completely bald headed and go from being 58 to looking 68 instantly.

Then as I was wrestling as Terry Boulder. I was on a talk show with Lou Ferrigno, and I was actually bigger than he was! I went back to the dressing room that night and all of the wrestlers go 'Oh my God you're bigger than the hulk on TV' so they started calling me Terry 'The Hulk' Boulder.

I'm 58 years old and I just went through 8 back surgeries. They started cutting on me in February 2009, and I was basically bed ridden for almost two years. I got a real dose of reality that if you don't have your health, you don't have anything.

A few hours after the news broke about the death of crime writer Donald E. Westlake, a newspaper asked me to write a tribute. In short order I did so, calling attention to his decades-long career, both under his own name and that of his primary alter ego, Richard Stark, who introduced the unsentimental antihero-heister Parker to the literary canon.

If I had not passed through trial - through passion, one could say - through these years so painful and so rich, I don't believe I could take on my life and my career as I do today.

The tension in pro ball comes from the realization that any game could be your last, that an injury could end your career. And in TV, you never know if or when your series will be canceled.

Any actor wants their movies and their work to be seen. You don't make a movie or get into this profession for your work not to be seen and just to show them to your mates at home.