WWE Diva Mickie James Slams Into ‘Psych’

Calling all wrassling fans!

Tomorrow night’s installment of Psych is a female-friendly, sports-driven episode called “Talk Derby to Me.” The main plot revolves around a perplexing series of robberies that cause Maggie Lawson’s Detective Juliet O’Hara to go undercover by joining a roller derby team. Check her out looking lean and mean in the top photo.

Although the lovely athletic ladies at the center of the action don roller skates — and lots of knee and elbow pads, I’m sure — to battle each other in the ring, the top-billed guest star actually hails from the world of professional wrestling. She is current Monday Night Raw WWE Diva Mickie James, who plays a character with the scary moniker Lethal Weapon (love the movie, too, by the way).

To help promote her first guest acting role on a scripted television show, Mickie kindly participated in an interview about her appearance earlier this week. After revealing that series star and huge wrestling fan James Roday (Shawn Spencer) requested her when he learned about the episode’s storyline (lucky woman!), the down-to-earth Diva talks about:

• Spending so much time on skates (not a big deal since she had prior exposure through her mom’s former job at Skateland)

• Learning how to fall properly from Vancouver’s roller derby team (the training wasn’t really needed in the long run since she didn’t fall)

• The difference between acting on-camera with a predetermined script (Psych) and acting live without a script (Monday Night RAW or similar to an improvised show like Reno 911!)

Interestingly enough, the one thing that doesn’t surprise me at all is Mickie’s confirmation that James and Dulé Hill (Burton “Gus” Guster) are just as much of a hoot together off-screen as they are on-screen.

According to her, “[T]hose two are characters. They were cutting up the whole time, and it was so hard to keep a straight face a lot of the time because they had me laughing a lot. They were giving me, definitely, a run for my money because we were just joking around the whole time.”

For some reason, it makes me feel great to know my two favorite BFFs on TV have a similar rapport in real life. I knew they couldn’t be faking all of that camaraderie, and after a week off, we’ll be seeing more of it during “Talk Derby to Me.”

Psych airs Fridays on USA at 10pm EST.