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By Jeff Gordinier
Jeff Gordinier
Jeff Gordinier is an editor-at-large for EW; he has occasionally been mistaken for actor Edward Norton

Before Tim Burton came to him, the Animal was living with a riddle. ''I had a lot of people come up to me and say, 'Hey, we saw you in a movie! Coming out $ of the grave!''' recalls George ''the Animal'' Steele, the retired pro wrestler who makes his screen debut in director Burton's Ed Wood. ''This went on for years, and I didn't know what they were talking about.'' The Animal, as it turns out, had a secret twin: With his shaved head, mastodon physique, and flesh-eating glare, Steele is a dead ringer for Tor Johnson, the skinheaded wrestler who stomped through a string of Ed Wood's cheapo horror flicks in the '50s. ''We really are identical look-alikes,'' says Steele, whose real name is Jim Myers. ''Which is not a compliment, because Tor Johnson was the first guy to do monster movies without makeup.'' Even so, the resemblance landed the 57-year-old strongman the role of his gargantuan doppelganger in Burton's tale of the transvestite director and his entourage of freaks. Eerily, Neanderthal looks aren't the only things Steele shares with Johnson, who died in 1971. Like Johnson, Steele won a cult following in the bruising, flamboyant netherworld of professional wrestling. The Animal, whose career lasted from the early '60s to 1988, had a shtick that involved painting his tongue green, ripping off foam corner pads with his teeth, and bludgeoning opponents into whimpering submission. Acting before the camera was luxurious compared with performing for a frothy mob of fans. ''I don't think I've ever been more relaxed doing anything in my life,'' marvels the 6'1'', 300-pound Steele, who had to wear platform shoes and actually put on 25 pounds to achieve Johnson's thundering heft. As for Burton, the man who made him eat, Steele calls him ''brilliant'' and ''fantastic.'' These days, Steele lives in Cocoa Beach, Fla., and produces wrestling events. A family man (he and his wife of 39 years have three grown kids) with impeccable manners, Steele hopes to convert Ed Wood into a Hollywood career- and he doesn't have to look far for inspiration. When he studied Johnson's cretin-eyed thespian work in Plan 9 From Outer Space, he reacted with shock- and a bit of encouragement. ''It looked like it was made in a high school gym,'' he says. ''It was terrible, really. But if you were intimidated by the movie business, after looking at that you were like, 'Hell, I can do that!''' Then again, intimidation has never quite been in the Animal's vocabulary.


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Posted Sep 30, 1994 | Published in issue #242 Sep 30, 1994 | Order Article Reprints