Rebekka Johnson (who plays Dawn Rivecca, aka “Edna Rosenblatt” of the Beatdown Biddies) recently spoke with Wrestlezone’s Bill Pritchard ahead of GLOW’s third season premiere on Netflix. Johnson spoke about being into wrestling growing up, but said she got more invested in it now and got to learn first-hand from the people we see on TV each week.
“Yeah, I’m definitely more of a wrestling fan than I ever was. I watched GLOW when I was a little girl. And, I loved it when I was a kid. I remember watching it when I was, like, 6, and being like, ‘I shouldn’t be watching this,’ it felt salacious. But then,” Johnson said, “when the audition came up, I was so pumped because I knew exactly what that show was. And it just felt like, ‘Wow, this is so cool that I actually watched this and I might get an opportunity to be a part of that legacy.’”
“Then once we started wrestling I started watching a lot of WWE, and then we would go—if Chavo had a match somewhere we would go. We went to Lucha [Underground], and we would get to really experience all different levels of what’s happening in wrestling now. And being on SmackDown was awesome. Getting to meet Naomi, Lana, Paige, Becky Lynch, I was watching them on TV and then I was literally standing next to them and they were saying they like GLOW. That was crazy to me,” Johnson said. “We also went to RAW and I went to SmackDown before and got to go backstage and meet a bunch of people and talk to them. I don’t know, it was cool, I felt very starstruck getting to meet them and then getting to see them up close, like, do what they do, be ringside. It was an honor to be in that arena.”
There are a lot of callbacks to the original GLOW wrestling series, as well as some fun themes like the Christmas themed episode this season. Johnson says she’d like to explore more of the backstage antics seen in professional wrestling in future seasons, noting that more locker room bits and some of the bigger and more dangerous elements would be a fun challenge. She said working with Chavo Guerrero Jr. helps make sure the on-screen work matches the era, but as the show gets closer to the next decade she wouldn’t mind seeing what some of the late ’80s and ’90s fans grew up on.
“Chavo Guerrero Jr., who is our wrestling coach, he’s the one who is going to always be like, ‘This is what they were doing in ’86, this is what they were doing in ’87,’ Johnson said. “There’s a lot of hair-pulling, there’s a lot of—he kind of keeps it sort of in the reality of the evolution of wrestling. But I feel like, yeah, a lot of what I think of for wrestling is from the ’90s, because that’s probably when I was watching it when my brother was into it. And then obviously I watch wrestling, like contemporary wrestling now. But I think it would be fun to incorporate more than just what we’ve done.”
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