Memphis actor is Bam Bam Bigelow on TV series
Memphis actor Patrick Cox has tussled with Catwoman and tangled with Aquaman.
But in three Memphis-set episodes of the current season of “Young Rock” on NBC, the man-mountain thespian will become a larger-than-life figure himself — not a comic-book character but a man who walked (or stomped through) the real world, leaving a trail of memories in the minds of his fans and bruises on the bodies of his opponents.
In “Young Rock,” Cox portrays professional wrestler Scott Charles Bigelow, a 400-pound behemoth who was better known as Crusher Yurkov and later even better known as Bam Bam Bigelow. Under these colorful ring names, Bigelow blazed through the Memphis wrestling circuit in the 1980s with the fiery audacity of the signature flame tattoo that circumnavigated his shaved head.
Cox — already big and bald and intimidating — felt like the hand of fate as much as that of any casting director might have picked him for the role of Bam Bam.
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Born and raised in Memphis before moving to Los Angeles about a decade ago to pursue his dream of being a full-time actor, Cox said he has been a “huge” (in more ways than one) Bam Bam fan since the 1980s when the wrestler began regularly knocking heads with such celebrated local grapplers as Jeff Jarrett and Jerry Lawler.
In fact, before he became an actor, Cox wrestled professionally in the early 2000s under the name “Choke Bigelow,” in matches at the New Daisy on Beale hosted by the “hardcore” KAW (Kick Ass Wrestling) circuit in the late 1990s. “I always favored him, so the gimmick was I was Bam Bam’s little brother,” he said.
Cox, 46, said the part of Bigelow was “probably the only time in my life I’ve been really nervous about playing a role.
“I wanted to honor his memory as much as anything. I wanted to make sure I showed Bam Bam the respect the script did. It shows Bam Bam as he was, just a goofy kid who was a complete animal and monster in the ring but was really a super-sweet guy.” (Sadly, Bigelow was plagued by emotional and health issues throughout his life, and he died at 45 in 2007, of a drug overdose.)
Filming ‘Young Rock’ in Australia
Now in its second season on NBC, “Young Rock” is a Tuesday night half-hour fact-inspired comedy series narrated, in framing sequences, by wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The episodes are presented as flashbacks, with youthful actors playing the Rock as a child, high school student or young man.
In Cox’s three episodes (the first of which aired April 5, with the others set for later this month), the teenaged Dwayne Johnson (played by Bradley Constant) travels to Memphis in the 1980s with his father, wrestler “Soulman” Rocky Johnson (Joseph Lee Anderson), who spars with Downtown Bruno and Jerry Lawler and other various real-life grapplers and managers of the era, all played by actors.
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In the April 5 episode, the Rock describes TV wrestling as “the biggest thing in Memphis.”
“When I first got the script and realized this was Memphis studio wrestling in the ’80s, I was amazed,” Cox said. Although the sets erected in Australia don’t specifically identify the “studio” as WMC-TV Channel 5, “it had the old Channel 5 wrestling look and vibe. I was just bummed they didn’t have actors play Lance and Dave,” he added, referring to longtime Memphis television wrestling hosts Lance Russell (who died in 2017) and Dave Brown.
Beginning last winter, Cox spent 11 weeks working on his three episodes at the massive Warner Roadshow Studio soundstages in Queensland, Australia — the same place where he had filmed scenes with Jason Momoa in “Aquaman” in 2017.
Said Cox: “So after moving from Memphis, I had to go all the way from Los Angeles to Australia to play a guy from New Jersey wrestling in Memphis.”
The travel wasn’t the only surreal aspect of the experience. The shooting took place under strict COVID-19 protocols, so Cox’s 11 weeks included two weeks in quarantine.
“I don’t know if there’s enough money for me to ever go through that again,” he said of the quarantine. “It was physically, emotionally, mentally the worst experience. It was, basically, if you had to be locked in an office and the windows couldn’t open and your life was a bed and a toilet and a shower.”
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His diet also wasn’t a delight. Already something of a Bigelow lookalike at 6-feet-5 and 330 pounds, Cox was determined to become as Bam Bamesque as possible by lifting weights and binging on carbs. “It was 7-11 sandwiches every day.”
Cox expanded to 380 pounds for the role. For many of his scenes, he said, “I was all in spandex, which was a little embarrassing, going out in front of hundreds of strangers in a Spandex singlet. You will definitely see a new dimension of my belly when you watch ‘Young Rock.'”
Marveled Lawler, in an interview: “He looks just like Bam Bam.”
Cox couldn’t transform himself into Bam Bam by himself, however. Each day, he spent three hours in the makeup chair. “They had to completely cover all the tattoos on every part of my body that was showing, then apply all the tattoos that Bam Bam had” — notably, what Cox calls the “iconic flames and squiggles” that covered Bigelow’s head.
With action coordinated by professional wrestler Chavo Guerrero Jr., the wrestling sequences were “long, very physically demanding, and very intense,” Cox said. “It was real, it was not green screens. It was not flopping. It was a real wrestling ring, and a lot of the guys were real wrestlers.”
Not just real wrestlers but real wrestlers playing fictionalized versions of other real wrestlers. “I walked into the lunch area my first day on set and thought I was in some sort of fever dream. The people in the hair and makeup departments deserve a raise, because there I am sitting next to Captain Lou Albano and Hillbilly Jim and the Iron Sheik, and they look just like the real guys.”
Memphis wrestling
Already a fan of the “Young Rock” series, Cox said he has especially enjoyed season two, “when they really open up the wrestling,” with the emphasis on the relationship between Rocky and Dwayne Johnson. “It is a very warm family show,” Cox said. “It’s very endearing.”
Interestingly, another current not-made-in-Memphis comedy series, “The Righteous Gemstones” on HBO, also has added a Memphis wrestling plotline. Lawler said he’s not surprised the city’s pro wrestling heyday continues to celebrated, even decades later.
“Memphis has such a great, rich wrestling history that almost everybody who is anybody in the wrestling world either started in Memphis or came through Memphis, and was influenced by Memphis wrestling,” he said.
“The cool thing about Rock is that he remembers his past, he remembers where he came from,” Lawler added. “His company Seven Bucks Productions, that’s a reference to the seven bucks Downtown Bruno loaned him when he got to Memphis.”
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Agreed Cox: “It really is cool to see someone as big as the Rock paying respect to where he came from and to the people who helped mold him into who he is. This show is going to have a lot of people going into YouTube and typing in ‘Tommy Rich’ and ‘Bill Dundee’ and guys like that.”
Unlike many hopefuls who move to “Hollywood” for a career in film and television, Cox — who caught the acting bug working in local productions with such directors as Craig Brewer and Jeremy Benson — never has had a so-called day job. With an imposing physical presence that can generate either laughs or chills, he has worked steadily, in alternately large and small roles in such films and programs as “Veronica Mars,” “General Hospital” and “Batman Begins.” (In the latter, he played a rude prison inmate whose wrist is snapped by a cartwheeling Catwoman, played by Anne Hathaway.)
He also shot a comedic scene for the gruesome 2021 horror hit “Malignant,” but it was cut from the finished film because, ultimately, “it didn’t fit the tone of the movie,” he said.
Despite his relative success, Cox said his heart remains east of the Mississippi.
“I tell everyone every day, all I want in this world is to find enough success to go back to Memphis. My career goal is not to own a mansion in Bel Air but to buy a half acre in Memphis and move back to my old neighborhood.”