WWE’s Dolph Ziggler Recalls What He Told Hugh Jackman Before Getting Punched in the Face

It’s been nearly a full decade since Hugh Jackman appeared on WWE’s Monday Night Raw in what’s regarded as one of the best celebrity cameos of all time. For those who never saw it, the X-Men actor was on the Sept. 19 episode to promote the upcoming release of Real Steel and assisted Zack Ryder (who was riding a massive wave of popularity at the time thanks to his hit YouTube series) in beating then-United States Champion Dolph Ziggler by punching “The Show-Off” right in the face.

Ziggler appeared on Ryan Satin’s Out of Character Podcast this week and reflected on that night, recalling that he told the man formerly known as Wolverine to punch him as hard as he could to make it look real.

“He was so nice and he was a fan,” Ziggler said (h/t Fightful). “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 continued. “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.”

Jackman would appear on Raw again in 2014, this time alongside Ziggler in a segment where Damian Sandow pretended to be Magneto.