Before you can see WWE superstar Phil “CM Punk” Brooks in the Soska sisters’ remake of David Cronenberg’s Rabid, you can catch him toplining Dark Sky Films’ haunted house horror film Girl on the Third Floor, now in limited theaters and on VOD platforms.

Bloody Disgusting caught up with Punk, who stars as Don Koch, a man who is failing as a husband. He now views fixing up an old house as a chance to make up for past mistakes. Meanwhile, his wife, Liz Koch, is concerned about the renovation timeline as they have a baby on the way. As Don tears the house apart, it begins to tear him apart as well, revealing the rot behind the drywall.

“Don is a 30-something guy with a bit of a past,” Punk tells Bloody Disgusting. “I don’t want to give any spoilers, but Don has some baggage and he is moving to the suburbs to renovate a house to start over with him and his wife, who is expecting their first child.”

Being that Girl on the Third Floor is a haunter, don’t expect a bloodbath. “As far as violence goes…It’s not the most violent movie,” he explained. “It’s more of a tense, slow burner, but it’s [still] bloody and it’s gory and it’s violent at times. It’s not an Evil Dead 2 gorefest, but when it comes time, they amp it up to an 11 for sure.”

“I don’t know how much I played around with the special effects, but I got to be played with,” he joked when asked about the effects work. “There was one night shoot in particular where it was easily a 16 hour day and we started late, so I was in a chair being attended to and had prosthetics applied for maybe 6-8 hours. Dan Martin is brilliant with his work and he got this job based on his work in Lords of Chaos. I can’t speak enough to how amazing his work was.”

Punk also spoke about his transition from wrestling to acting.

“I think that’s an extremely easy transition. It’s all in front of the camera so, in a lot of ways, it’s the same thing,” he echoes. “In wrestling, you play a character. It’s almost more akin to soap operas where these people play the same characters for 20 – 25 years. In wrestling, you go through character changes, but you’re still the same guy. CM Punk was always a character who had beliefs and a value system and I had to kind of navigate that throughout my career. I think it’s the same way with acting. You just get a role and put a different skin on every time and that becomes the character. You have to get the core of what the character’s belief system is and values and you play it from there.”

What makes Punk’s arrival to the horror scene even more exciting is that he’s a legit, honest-to-god horror fan.

“I’m a huge horror guy!” Punk exclaimed when asked about his love of the genre. “I would walk into the video store when I was a kid and I would be immediately drawn to the horror section. This is dating me obviously, but I would go to the horror section and look at the big boxes. The covers of these things had me fascinated.”

What franchises was he drawn to? “I grew up very much a Halloween kid; a Friday the 13th kid. I was a huge horror movie geek. I had a bunch of gory magazines that my mom threw out because she was worried that she was raising a serial killer.”

“To me, I think it’s fantastic that the biggest show on television is a zombie show. All these things that I guess were taboo or that I got shunned or made fun of for liking when I was a little kid are now very accessible and I think it’s amazing. People just keep creating great things.”

Punk checks all the boxes for the Bloody Disgusting family being that he’s not only a pro wrestler, but also a huge horror fan who happens to also be from Chicago.

“Shooting locally in Chicago was amazing. Frankfort, Illinois isn’t all that far from Lockport, which is where I grew up,” he tells us. “I knew the area and I had a lot of friends there when I was a kid. It was nice to not have to fly anywhere because I hate flying. To be a part of something that was so centered in Chicago? I’m tickled to death about it. It was the greatest thing.”

With that, we had to ask the toughest question of all: what’s the best deep dish pizza in Chicago? “This is a very delicate question,” Punk laughs, knowing I just threw him a nasty curveball. Still, he doesn’t hold back and makes us fellow Chicagoans proud. “First of all, everybody who complains about Chicago-style deep dish pizza and says, ‘It’s a ‘casserole?’ Fuck you! What’s wrong with casserole? Like you never ate lasagna before? It’s delicious. Don’t tell me that it’s too much bread, just shut up.”

“If you wanna stay in Hackensack, NJ and eat your shitty, flat pizza, do that. That’s your prerogative. But it’s 2019 and I’m officially declaring it over. Chicago pizza wins. As far as best, if I’m going deep dish, I go with [Lou] Malnati’s. Pequod’s has a pan pizza with a caramelized crust which is pretty outstanding, but I’m a Malnati’s guy. If you don’t like that, then fuck you.”

Check out Punk’s leading performance in Dark Sky Films’ Girl on the Third Floor, now in theaters and on VOD platforms.