It’s not all that often that you can look a biographical movie such as Fighting With My Family and expect it to be 100% factual. In fact this is almost never the case since Hollywood tends to put its own spin on things to make it a bit more dramatic. Such a thing was done in this movie as well, but overall it would seem that according to Paige, the WWE superstar that the movie is about, the filmmakers managed to reach an amazing 97%, give or take, when it came to telling her story. From her family and upbringing to the moment when she became the youngest Diva’s Champion in the WWE it was shown just how Paige struggled and pushed herself to make her name stand out in the WWE.
Here’s just a few things among the many that were done right.
Her family life was accurately portrayed.
Paige, real name Saraya Knight, does come from a wrestling family and did start out at the age of 13. She was reluctant largely because she’d never done it, but she was and is fiercely dedicated to her family and so went into the ring with the intention of becoming the best she could be. Her brother Zak had been wrestling since he was 6 and wanted it even more, but unfortunately he was cut from the ranks the first time and the second time he tried out, and had a lot of issues dealing with this. Her mother and father did have rough lives before finding one another and both credit wrestling and each other with turning their lives around. In terms of lookalikes for the movie there doesn’t seem to be any way that the cast could look much more like their real-life counterparts as the appearance and their attitudes were modeled closely after the Knight family, down a tee in fact in some cases.
Dwayne Johnson did take notice of her.
Johnson was actually in London filming Fast and Furios 6 and he was up during the wee hours of the morning and happened to notice a documentary featuring Paige and her family that rather impressed him. In the film Zak and Paige mention their wrestling promotion and Johnson acts like never heard of it, so it could be an allusion to the fact that, since he does mention he’s in England shooting a movie, that they put the proverbial bug in his ear and it all happened to work out, while in real life it would seem he watched the documentary before ever meeting the pair. Plus, Paige has already admitted that the Rock never shouted at her and her brother in the manner that’s seen in the movie. It was a fun scene since anyone that’s ever watched the Rock can attest to his loud and very brash manner and his penchant for putting people in their place, but as Paige has said this never happened, though he did stop to talk to them.
She did beat AJ Lee for the Diva’s title on RAW following Wrestlemania in 2014.
Paige’s push into the WWE after her time in NXT was primarily due to Dwayne Johnson and a few of her trainers that were represented by the movie’s Hutch Morgan. While Morgan is fictitious the fact is that Johnson pulled her aside at Wrestlemania and revealed that she would be taking on AJ Lee and that she would become the Diva’s Champion on the following night. The difference between the movie and reality however is that in the movie Paige didn’t speak before AJ slapped her across the face, and Tamina was not by her side. In real life Paige did mention that she’d come out congratulate AJ, but she didn’t stick around after winning the title to deliver one of her best lines, “This is my house now!”. Instead, as Tamina was there in the actual match Paige was out of the ring and up the ramp with the title in hand as AJ fumed in the ring.
Paige did seem to be a polarizing figure in the WWE but there’s no doubt of her heart and her passion for the wrestling world or the fact that she’s helped put the WWE on notice that women hare taking a more prominent role and that they deserve ever moment they get and more. She did eventually lose the title but up until her retirement following a neck injury she was one of the most dominant women in the ring and made sure everyone knew as much. The moment her music played people knew that they were in for a show and that things were about to get a bit rough for whoever was standing against her. That being said though, Paige has also been a big boost to the women’s locker room throughout the years as she came out and showed she belongs in the WWE, and that women could be so much more than window dressing.
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