Dolph Ziggler told Hugh Jackman to punch him in the face as hard as he could.
Jackman appeared as a guest star on WWE in September 2011 to promote his forthcoming Real Steel movie. On that night, he stood in Zack Ryder's corner in a match against Dolph Ziggler. After Vickie Guerrero was kicked out for slapping Ryder, the X-Men star took advantage of a distracted referee and clocked Dolph Ziggler with a punch that sent him directly into the path of a Rough Ryder.
Speaking with Ryan Satin on his Out of Character show, Ziggler discussed the angle and how he told Jackman to make it count or else he would get fired.
"Backstage, he's a sweetheart guy. He was so nice and he was a fan," said Ziggler. "He remembered Brooklyn Brawler coming to a show when he was a kid. He remembered a bunch of different things. He was like, 'how can we make this awesome?' Again, that is rare. You could be bringing up someone else and I'd be like, 'that was okay.' This guy wanted to make this amazing. He didn't have to. There were no rules for him. He could do whatever he wanted.
We figured it out where he's going to -- I see him there, he's got Broski's headband on and he's going to punch me in the face. He goes, 'so what do we do? I kind of swing by you?' I go, 'if you don't punch me in the face as hard as you can, I'm going to get fired and I'm coming after you. We have 500 cameras out there and a world watching, you got to punch me because we got enough people saying this stuff's phony, anyways. You got to freaking hit me and make this count.' I go, 'don't worry, you can see by the jaw I can take a freaking punch.'
So, right before we went out I said one last time, 'listen man if you're going to halfway do it or miss, let's switch this right now because I need you to punch me in the face with my hands down and my head [extends neck forward].' He goes, 'I promise you I won't let you down,' and he cracked me in the face pretty damn hard. It was great."
Ziggler would eventually team up with Jackman during his next appearance in 2014 where they took out Damien Sandow dressed up as Magneto.
Dolph currently performs on SmackDown as part of The Dirty Dawgs tag team with Robert Roode. They lost their SmackDown Tag Team Titles to Rey and Dominik Mysterio last week at WrestleMania Backlash.
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