“I love those girls,” Mickie James said of The Bella Twins – Nikki and Brie Bella – while chatting EXCLUSIVELY with HollywoodLife during an episode of TVTalk on IG Live. Mickie, 41, who launched GAW TV in 2020 with two of her fellow in-ring icons, praised Nikki and Brie, 37, for how they’ve been able to expand the whole “Bella” brand into new and exciting entertainment avenues. “They’ve crossed over into the wine space as well,” adds Mickie. Clearly, we’re in the same realm because we have wine on our show.”
“I think it’s really, really cool to see them take what they’ve learned from wrestling and all of these kinds of facets and develop their own brand, to really branch out and do something so unique that really hasn’t been done on a female capacity a whole lot,” adds Mickie. “They’re truly one of the first power couple girls to do it in a sense.”
“I always say you have to credit the generations before,” explains Mickie. Before [Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson], there had been a few who had crossed over into mainstream stuff, but there really hadn’t been a whole lot of females.” Mickie brought up Stacy Keibler, who had noted roles in ” How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, and Psych, ” as well as a high-profile relationship with George Clooney. “Stacy Kiebler was probably the first to cross over and do that whole thing, and then since then, it’s really been [The Bellas].”
“I like to say myself but more in the music world,” says Mickie, who released two albums of country music – 2010’s Strangers & Angels and 2013’s Somebody’s Gonna Pay – and a handful of non-album singles, including “I Don’t Give A,” “Great Minds,” and “Christmas Presence.” While she has found success (she was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame in 2017), Mickie shares that her crossover achievements are “not really in that Hollywood kind of life.”
Mickie does credit the Bellas fame because “it’s empowered a lot of women to know that there are no limits and there are no boundaries. I think they were the first to really instill that in today’s generation, which is really, really cool to see.”
GAW TV – short for “Grown Ass Women” – features Mickie with two of her fellow in-ring icons: Lisa Marie Varon, aka Victoria from WWE, and Valerie “SoCalVal” Wyndham, best known for her work in Total Nonstop Action. Mickie, who worked in TNA as Alexis Laree, shared how GAW TV came about.
“I had an injury. That’s how this kind of transpired,” she tells HollywoodLife. “Val, Lisa, and I talked separately about doing something together. Because of the pandemic, I was home with my ACL injury. I was in the final steps of getting cleared and all of that stuff. The struggle is real! I thought I’d be back to work in no time, and it was a year-and-a-half later, it felt like. These are my sisters. We’ve shared locker rooms together. We’ve shared rings together.”
“We just made it a podcast at the beginning of the year because we are almost a year now,” adds Mickie. “We started as a TV show fun thing that we thought it would be quirky. We know that it’s two different audiences, really.”
Over the first year of GAW TV, the show has featured guest appearances from singer Taylor Dane, Atlanta Braves star Bryce Wilson, RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Ginger Minj, and wrestling legends like Jazz, Al Snow, Chavo Guerro, Mick Foley, ODB, and Natalya. You can see these and all the other episodes by subscribing to GAW TV here.