Wrestler Chris Jericho embraces ’scream king’ status with slasher ’Dark Match’

From playing a washed-up rock star in 2010’s “MacGruber” to a gruff psychiatric hospital orderly in last year’s “Terrifier 3,” pro wrestler Chris Jericho has built quite an eclectic acting resume.

Yet a realm he’s steered clear of on the big screen is the very one where he made his name: the squared circle.

“I don’t really like doing wrestling-related movies because I wrestle, and I find that they’re a little bit cliched most of the time,” says the Winnipeg native on a virtual call from New York.

“And frankly, a lot of them aren’t very good.”

But when the script for slasher “Dark Match” came Jericho’s way, it hit him like a steel chair shot. The fact that it was written by Lowell Dean, the Saskatchewan director behind 2014 cult horror-comedy “WolfCop”_ a personal favourite of his — only sweetened the deal.

Jericho was especially swayed by the villain Dean envisioned for him: the Prophet, a deranged cult leader with sinister plans for a travelling group of wrestlers.

“I was pleasantly surprised at how well-written the script was and how deep the character of the leader was,” the AEW star recalls, adding he felt it was a role he could lose himself in.

“We worked really hard to make people forget that it’s Chris Jericho… It’s just this wacko cult leader murdering people in the ring.”

“Dark Match,” hitting Canadian theatres Friday, follows a low-tier wrestling company in the ’80s that jumps at a lucrative gig in a remote backwater town. Before long, the grapplers — including Ayisha Issa of CTV’s “Transplant” and Steven Ogg of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” — realize the local community is under the grip of Jericho’s crazed messiah, who’s planned the event as part of a deadly game.

Jericho also served as executive producer of the Edmonton-shot film to ensure the wrestling aspects felt authentic. The 54-year-old drew on his three decades in the business as a crafty, larger-than-life showman, from his many title reigns in WWE to his current run as a heel in AEW.

He says the indie circuit grind in “Dark Match” took him back to the early days of his career, working for small-time wrestling promotions across the Prairies.

“The first few years, I was travelling in vans, up and down the roads of Saskatchewan and Alberta and Manitoba. I never stumbled on to a satanic cult, but there’s quite a few shows that were just weird,” he says.

“You’d go to a town where it says, ‘Population: 250’ and there’d be 500 people. Where’d they come from? They came down from the mountains. Like, you don’t think there were some creepy people there?”

Jericho is becoming a familiar face in the horror genre, taking on gruesome roles in Damien Leone’s hit “Terrifier” franchise and Kevin Smith’s 2022 slasher comedy anthology “KillRoy Was Here.”

“I’m a scream king now,” he laughs.

He considers himself a lifelong horror buff, having grown up on classics like 1941’s “The Wolf Man” and 1954’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

“I can remember being a kid and there were late-night horror movies on TV, like pre-VCR. My mom would let me watch the movies, but I had to sleep first,” he says.

“I got up every time…. You don’t have a chance to see ‘Dracula A.D. 1972’ if you sleep in. You can’t go rent it or stream it the next day. It’s gone! So that’s where my whole horror movie obsession started.”

Though he tends to like darker fare, Jericho isn’t opposed to a little shmaltz. He starred in 2023 UPtv romantic drama “Country Hearts” — and its sequel, “Country Hearts Christmas” — as the concerned father of two sisters torn between chasing their dreams of music stardom and helping their family’s horse-breeding business.

“There’s no role too weird or too sentimental for me to do,” he says.

Jericho is keen to dive into more acting projects. But while some have speculated his wrestling career may be nearing its end, don’t expect him to hang up the tights any time soon.

“I’m not going to wrestle forever. I don’t want to wrestle forever. But right now, I still enjoy it. I feel great. I can still contribute and still perform at a high level. So there’s no reason to stop. But if the right (acting) opportunity came up, I would do it,” he says.

“I love playing characters. I’ve been playing the character of Chris Jericho and all its different iterations for 34 years now. So any time I get a chance to do more, I’m going to do it because I really enjoy it. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was a kid.”