Andre The Giant Interview

Getting Your Hands on the Andre The Giant Interview

The Rolling Stone interview with Andre the Giant from 1985 is one of the most quoted pieces in professional wrestling history. William Buntrock sat down with him at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Los Angeles, and the resulting transcript runs roughly 10,000 words. It covers everything from his early days in Georgia Championship Wrestling to the physical toll of the business, and includes some of the most honest things Andre ever said on the record. If you have never read it, the best way to start is just finding a clean copy and reading it straight through. It takes about twenty minutes.

Andre The Giant Interview Where to Find It

The original interview was published in Rolling Stone issue 443 on July 10, 1985. You can find the full text on the Rolling Stone website if you have a subscription, but the complete transcript has been reproduced on several wrestling history sites over the years. The most reliable free version I have come across is archived on the Internet Archive and also posted in full on wrestlingnewstrack.com. The transcript on wrestlingnewstrack is the one I usually reference because it is cleanly formatted and includes the original editorial notes without the paywall. There are a few other versions floating around, including a longer cut that includes portions Buntrock chose not to use in the final piece. That extended version is harder to track down. I found a copy hosted on a small independent wrestling history blog, but the link rotates every few months, so I would search for "Andre the Giant Buntrock interview extended transcript" rather than trying to save a direct URL. The extended material mostly adds background on Andre's departure from Mid-South Wrestling and his time in Japan, but it does not change the core content of the original piece.

What Makes This Interview Worth Reading

Most wrestling interviews from that era follow the same pattern. The subject gives you sound bites, promotes whatever feud is coming up, and avoids any real detail about the business. Andre was different because he had no interest in selling anything to the press. He was already a global star by 1985. He did not need to protect his booking position. What you get instead is a surprisingly candid look at someone who spent his entire adult life being treated like a spectacle rather than a person. He talks about the diet, which was mostly alcohol because eating solid food made him too sleepy. He discusses the custom shoes sized at a massive 44XXL and how he could not buy off the rack anything in his life. He explains why he avoided certain matches in the mid-card and how the physical damage accumulated faster than anyone outside his inner circle realized. One of the more brutal passages is where he describes the routine of taping his joints before going on camera and how the painkillers were part of the workflow, not an afterthought. That detail alone separates this interview from most others in the genre. Another thing people miss on first read is how clearly Andre understands the economics of wrestling. He names specific territory promotions, explains how gate percentages worked, and describes the exact moment he realized he was making more money in the WWF than he ever had in the Midwest territories. He does not frame it as revenge or betrayal. He frames it as basic survival. You watch him make that calculation in real time while talking, and it is striking because he never sounds bitter about it.

Common Problems When Looking for This Interview

I ran into a specific issue last year when trying to compile a reference sheet for a class discussion. I had eight different websites linking to the transcript, and five of them had it truncated at around page six. The remaining three had the full text but included random HTML artifacts inside the body paragraphs, like stray The workaround I ended up using was to download the PDF version from the Internet Archive, which preserves the original layout of the Rolling Stone print edition. It is not as easy to read on a phone, but the text is clean and searchable. If you need to quote from it, taking screenshots of the relevant pages and doing OCR on them is faster than wrestling with a broken HTML version. I use a free browser extension called "OCR Space" for that, and it takes about thirty seconds per page. Not ideal, but it saved me from having to manually transcribe fifteen pages of fragmented text.

What the Interview Gets Wrong or Leaves Out

Andre died in January 1993. The interview was published in 1985. That means nearly eight years of additional context are missing, including the severity of his acromegaly progression and the events leading to his death. Some readers treat the interview as a complete autobiography, which it is not. It is a snapshot from a single afternoon. Andre was fifty-two years old at the time, and while he looked remarkably healthy for someone with his condition, he was already dealing with complications that would become fatal within seven years. The interview also does not address his relationship with many of the wrestlers who worked against him regularly. Hulk Hogan gets a few passing mentions, but there is almost no detail about the backstage dynamics in the WWF during the late seventies and early eighties. If you are looking for gossip or dirt, this is not the source. If you want a portrait of a man who was aware of how the industry used him and accepted it without performative resentment, this is as close as you will get. One limitation worth noting is that the interview was conducted in English by a journalist who had never worked in wrestling. Andre sometimes corrected Buntrock's phrasing or clarified cultural references, but there are moments where the questions are slightly off-target, particularly around European wrestling customs. Andre does his best to answer, but he occasionally redirects back to territory-specific details that may not mean anything to a reader outside North America. Those sections are still useful, but they require some contextual knowledge to interpret correctly.

How to Use This Interview Effectively

If you are reading it for research or personal interest, skip the intro and work chronologically. The most valuable material clusters in the middle third, where Andre shifts from promotional talk to actual reflection. The opening forty-five minutes of transcript are mostly setting the scene at the restaurant and establishing rapport. The payoff comes after that, starting around the section where Buntrock asks about Andre's first memory of being famous. That question unlocks everything else. For anyone building a reading list around professional wrestling history, I would place this alongside the Howard Cosell interview with Bob Arum, the Lester Hunt profiles of Muhammad Ali, and the Gay Talese pieces from the seventies. It belongs in the same category of long-form sports journalism where the subject stops performing for the camera and starts talking like a regular human being. That shift is rare, and it is what makes the piece endure. If you want something shorter to read first, there is a ten-minute excerpt that Rolling Stone posted on their website a few years back. It covers the diet and the physical toll sections and gives you a reasonable sense of the full interview's tone. If you finish that and want more, go straight to the full transcript on the Internet Archive. The extended version is worth the extra effort, but only if you are already familiar with the basic facts of Andre's career. The additional territory details will confuse you if you have not read anything else about Georgia Championship Wrestling or the NWA in that period.