“I will never learn as much as he’s forgotten about WoW.”
Former WWE Raw Women’s Champion Ronda Rousey found the best way to keep herself occupied during the pandemic, by becoming immersed in World of Warcraft.
Ronda, who stars in Blizzard Entertainment’s sound the Horn campaign to celebrate the release of World of Warcraft’s new expansion Shadowlands, spoke to Digital Spy exclusively about how much gaming has helped her and her family during the pandemic.
“[Gaming’s] been immensely important, not just for myself but for my kids and my husband [UFC fighter Travis Browne] as well,” Ronda explained.
“We’ve always been a big gaming family and it’s really helped a lot. So it’s kind of become our pandemic-safe family activity that we’ve been able to continue, with everything being as crazy as it is.”
It was through World of Warcraft that Ronda’s family got into gaming together. “When I first started dating my husband, I was playing WoW all the time and so he wanted to play because he wanted to spend time with me and then all my kids started playing and we’d like run raids and Dungeons and everything together,” she said.
Ronda’s first introduction to WoW came when she was working on The Expendables 3 in 2014 and needed something to keep her occupied during her downtime on set.
“I was filming Expendables 3 in Sofia, Bulgaria and there were a lot of big names in the movie,” Ronda explained.
“So me and the other young guns, we were basically just there and available throughout all of filming because whenever the big name guys would come in they would cram all their days with everything that they had to shoot and we were just around for when they needed us.
“So sometimes we’d be working for like five days straight, sometimes we’d have like five days off, so I’d have a lot of downtime, when I was not training but I was exhausted, to just find something to do.
“So I’d always heard of World of Warcraft and I was like, ‘Well I heard that’s a big time sink,’ and I started playing it and I was absolutely like addicted to it the entire time I was there. It was just a really fun way for me to relax.”
Initially Ronda had no help at all while getting to grips with the game on her laptop, until she met Vin Diesel on the set of Furious 7.
“I mentioned to Vin Diesel’s sister that I started playing WoW and she was like, ‘No way, Vin’s gonna love you. He’s been playing WoW forever,'” she said.
“So we would actually meet up after filming to play WoW and he actually showed me the light. He was like, ‘Oh you dear, sweet angel, let me show you how to move with the mouse.’
“[Vin’s’] been playing since the beginning, I will never learn as much as he’s forgotten about WoW,” Ronda continued.
“I remember being so mad at him like, ‘I can’t control the camera, this is all over the place,’ and he would try to help me level up so I’d at least get like a flying mount so then I graduated to a laptop with a mouse.
“Now I’m like completely immersed with a big gaming PC and a curved monitor, I’ve completely been converted. It started as a casual thing and now it’s become a lifestyle.”
Though Vin Diesel is a pretty impressive gaming buddy to have, Ronda has a pretty surprising choice for the other celebrity she’d most like to game with.
“David Attenborough,” she said when asked what other celeb she’d like to game with. “Because I want to meet him so badly.” When asked what game she’d most like to play with him, Ronda chose the award-winning simulation game Everything.
“It’s a very relaxing game,” she said. “It’s not the kind of thing where you want to win, it’s more exploring and I think David Attenborough would be very, very good at that game.”
