WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry has revealed that he mentored AEW star Action Andretti prior to their signing with the company.
Despite a legendary career that included a memorable WWE World Heavyweight Championship run, Mark Henry has possibly made a bigger impact on the industry with his mentoring of young stars.
“The World’s Strongest Man” helped mentor former Raw and SmackDown Women’s Champion Bianca Belair as well as former AEW TBS Champion and current WWE star Jade Cargill.
Now, it appears another AEW star received the wealth of knowledge available to them through the WWE Hall of Famer as well.
Speaking to Kurt Angle and Paul Bromwell on the latest edition of the Kurt Angle Show, Mark Henry discussed what he wants to teach the young talent he works with. He said:
“I’m always gonna be around wrestling to some capacity. I feel like I’m more of a wrestling counselor than a coach,”
“I don’t teach them how. I want them to already know how. I teach them where you do it, when you do it, and why you do it.”
“I teach them to think outside the box because that’s what Stu Hart did for me, and Leo Burke, and Tom Prichard, and Rip Rogers, and Jim Cornette did for me. They were all free-spirited thinkers.”
“They would be like, ‘Stop being Mark Henry, nobody wants to hear that s**t. Be somebody else.'”
“So when you start thinking, how can I get over being something else? It opens up your brain to pro wrestling.”
Henry continued on to talk about the skills that he has picked up along the ways that helps him in any situation, saying:
“If somebody said Mark, you gotta be John Wayne. You give me 20-30 minutes with John Wayne rehearsal stuff, I’ll be the best John Wayne I can be,”
“I don’t need a lot of study time because all I need to know is what the character references [are] and the sound and voice flexion, and that’s the science of studying wrestling or acting, and that’s what I teach.”
“I enjoy the personal one-on-ones, the people I talk to every week. It’s working and when you see what you do works, it’s gratifying. I sit back sometimes like, ‘Man, I did that.'”
Revealing that he mentored AEW star Action Andretti leading to him being hired after only three coaching sessions, Henry said:
“Action Andretti, every time he passes me he goes [nods] and I know what that means.”
“He’s saying, ‘Thank you, but I got it,’ and he got it. He’s one of those that you have a conversation with, he didn’t have a job, and two or three sessions with me, they hired him.”
“So, those are the things that are good to me.”
Action Andretti signed with All Elite Wrestling in December 2022 following a win over Chris Jericho at AEW Dynamite: Winter Is Coming 2023.
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