A Stone Cold Steve Austin ''Nash Bridges'' spin-off? It almost happened!
"Can you smellllllll —" Oh, wait, no. That's The Rock's line. Here we go, "That's the bottom line 'cause Stone Cold said so."
Stone Cold Steve Austin is one of the most legendary wrestlers in wrestling history, but did you know he had a little acting experience, too? On Nash Bridges, there was a cool cat named Jake Cage. He was the "rough around the edges cop" who worked with Nash. Austin portrayed the recurring character for six episodes (two in the fourth season and four in the fifth). It was the first time the wrestler could be seen on television not taking a beer bath in a ring or playing himself.
Whether the character was one of your favorites or not, Austin's star power garnered so much attention that Detective Jake Cage almost had a spin-off! During an interview with Daily News in 1999, Stone Cold Steve Austin talked about his role and what was then in the near future for it.
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"I've only been him [Jake Cage] a total of three or four times now, so I'm trying to find him, and to find out what makes him tick, and to kind of feel more at home in that environment of being a quote-unquote actor," he said.
The wrestler got the series gig after one of Don Johnson's "sidekicks," who is a wrestling fan, pushed him to have the wrestling star on the series. The episodes he appeared in in the fourth season did so well that the series pushed for Austin to be in ten more episodes. However, due to scheduling conflicts, he could only sign on to do a few.
Austin was still fairly new to acting and wanted people to tell him if his acting on Nash Bridges was terrible. "If I was really horrible, I would appreciate it if someone said, 'Hey, saw you on Nash Bridges, and you were horrible.'"
It couldn't have been that bad since his agent kept getting requests for Austin to read scripts, and there were talks of a Jake Cage spin-off.