Casual fans or those who watch professional wrestling at a distance almost always misread the task and craft of those who shine most brightly: They think of wrestlers as actors; as stunt performers; as figures drawn from comic books in the flesh. If the former Ashley Elizabeth Fliehr takes any of this as an insult, she doesn’t let on.

The pleasant and unfailingly well-spoken 32-year-old from Charlotte, N.C., has dedicated a lot of thought to pro wrestling. She tried to make sense of it as a kid, partly because she had no other choice. Wrestling shaped her family life and at least in some significant part shattered it. That might have been one large reason why she never aspired to a career in the sport.

Few adolescents and young adults know wrestling is their calling — it’s usually not their first choice and it wasn’t little Ashley’s. One thing led to another, though, and she went all in, putting in hundreds of hours of soul-testing, spine-rattling, glamour-bereft work. And on her tortuous path to stardom in the WWE, she continued to study the game — not just its holds and throws and flips and falls, but its psychological and sociological underpinnings.