At this point in his career, Michael Bisping – UFC Hall of Famer, commentator, actor – looks to be leading a charmed life. But he knows you don’t want to hear about it.
“Nobody wants to hear about the glamour,” Bisping tells The National. “They want to hear about the stuff that goes on behind the scenes and all the struggles.”
Turns out, he’s had a lifetime of those, too. That’s part of why he thinks the next MMA biopic, after Dwayne Johnson’s The Smashing Machine, should be about his own life. “That’s very arrogant to say, I know,” says Bisping. “But there have been talks – and still are talks of it actually happening. Buddy, I need that cheque, let’s go!”
It’s also why, just before he returns to the commentary table at UFC 321 in Abu Dhabi on October 25, he’s putting on his own live show – Tales from the Octagon – as a storytelling dinner at W Abu Dhabi hotel on Yas Island. The British athlete and commentator promises it will be “gritty, real and raw”, exactly what you’d expect from a man with a prosthetic eye who once faked his way through medicals by memorising the letters on the eye chart before the doctor walked into the room.
Few places have showcased Bisping’s second act quite like Abu Dhabi. The emirate has become the UFC’s global stage, and Bisping one of its most familiar voices – analysing title fights, hosting fan events and keeping his place at the heart of a sport that has grown up alongside him.
“The passion the fans have out there is incredible,” he says. “They’ve been hosting events since 2009 – Anderson Silva versus Demian Maia, BJ Penn against Frankie Edgar – and it’s only grown.”
Each trip to the emirate leaves the same impression. “It’s absolutely beautiful. The people are great, and the fights are phenomenal. What more do you want?”
The UFC 321 main event looks set to continue that trend. The card, headlined by Britain’s reigning heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall and France’s Ciryl Gane, is among the year’s most anticipated.
For Bisping, who once carried British MMA on his own shoulders, Aspinall represents everything that’s changed since then – a homegrown champion with world-class talent and composure. Watching him move, Bisping recently compared him to perhaps the most famous heavyweight fighter in history.
“Tom’s a big guy, but he’s also very light on his feet,” Bisping says. “The majority of heavyweights are slower, plodding types. Muhammad Ali floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee – he was fast, he moved around the place.
“It’s not the showboating or the talking,” he adds. “It’s his athletic ability – the way he moves for such a big man. And, of course, he’s also very good. He may go down as the greatest of all time.”
As ever, Bisping can’t help but offer a suggestion for Aspinall’s fight strategy against Gane.
“Tom could go out there and grapple, he could stand and strike – he can choose his own poison,” he says. “But he’s clever. If he’s smart, he’ll take the easiest path and wrestle Gane, like Jon Jones did. Standing with Gane is risky.”
Away from the Octagon, Bisping has found another outlet for that discipline and precision. His move into acting, he says, happened by accident.
“There used to be a brand called Tapout that did clothing for UFC,” he says. “They made so much money they didn’t know what to do with it, so they started making movies. In 2009, I got offered a role – one of the main characters. I’d never acted, never even thought about it. But I accepted, worked with an acting coach, and at the end the director said: ‘You know what, you did a really good job. You might want to think more about this.’”
That role led to others, including a stint on long-running British soap Hollyoaks. When Bisping later moved to Los Angeles for training, he found himself close enough to Hollywood to take it seriously. “I found an agent, and slowly but surely things progressed,” he says. “I’ve got two lead roles coming out later this year – four movies in total, which is kind of unbelievable.”
He still refuses to call himself an actor. “I’m a fighter who does a little bit of acting,” he says. “I’m a little bit of this, a little bit of that. First and foremost, I’m a UFC commentator and Hall of Famer. But if I can do more acting, great. I just take it with a pinch of salt, I never get too carried away.”
Among the highlights was a brief but memorable appearance in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. “I was a big fan,” Bisping says. “When I went for the audition, they wouldn’t tell us what it was for – it was all very hush-hush. They were looking for interesting-looking people, and obviously my eye was all butchered and I had the cauliflower ears. So they said: ‘You’ve got a very interesting look.' Which I think is code for: ‘You look like you’ve been through some stuff.’
“I got the part and then found out it was Twin Peaks and it was David Lynch. He was an absolute legend – so nice and warm. I only had a small part, but when I finished he gave me a round of applause. I’ll always remember that.”
His encounter with Lynch also left him with a story that’s pure Bisping – funny, impatient, a little surreal.
“I had to leave to get to the UFC to work an event,” he says. “We’d finished filming and I was trying to go, but the producers said: ‘You can’t leave until David says you can.’ I told them: ‘Well, go ask him – I’ve got to go to the airport, I’ve got a plane to catch.’
“They said: ‘Oh, no, he’s in his trailer, meditating.’ I asked, ‘How long’s he going to be?’. And they said: ‘We don’t know – could be 15 minutes, could be three hours.’”
Fortunately, he was allowed to be on his way 10 minutes later, but Bisping laughs at the memory, still amused by the absurdity of it. The story seems to capture how he’s learnt to navigate the quiet between fights – the stillness that once drove him up the wall. “I guess I’ve found a way to channel that energy,” he says.
As a commentator, that discipline shows in his delivery. “When I first moved to America, my accent and the speed I speak at weren’t conducive to Americans understanding how I talk,” he says. “At Fox Sports, one of the producers told me: ‘We love the energy, but you speak so fast and don’t pronounce your words fully.’ So I had to learn how to talk properly – work with a dialect coach and a speech therapist.”
The change paid off. Bisping's voice is now one of the sport’s most recognisable, bridging audiences from Manchester to Las Vegas to Abu Dhabi. “I still get a lot of stick off English fans,” he says. “They’ll say: ‘Why are you talking like an American?’ I tell them: ‘Mate, I need to keep my job.’”
These days, Bisping moves between film sets and commentary booths with the same intensity that once defined him inside the cage. He may joke about cheques and jet lag, but behind the laughter is the same drive that carried him from anonymity to the Hall of Fame.
“Would I like to still compete a little bit? Yeah, I guess,” he says. “But I’ve also had a tremendous amount of injuries over the years, so it’s probably best that I don’t.”
He grins. “I’ve still got it, though.”
Michael Bisping's Tales from the Octagon is at W Abu Dhabi - Yas Island on October 23; doors open at 6.30pm; tickets are from Dh995
