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First Trailer for WWE Star Chyna's Documentary Features Interview Filmed One Week Before Her Death

"Ninth Wonder of the World" died exactly a year ago today

By Kendall Fisher, Taylor Bryant Apr 20, 2017 9:42 PMTags

It's hard to believe that today marks the one-year anniversary of WWE star Chyna's death.

E! News confirmed the famous wrestler passed away on April 20, 2016, after an official statement statement was released on her Twitter account. It read read: "It is with deep sadness to inform you today that we lost a true icon, a real life superhero. Joanie Laurer, AKA Chyna, the 9th Wonder of the World has passed away. She will live forever in the memories of her millions of fans and all of us that loved her."

A year later, she does, indeed, continue to live on. In fact, the very first trailer for the upcoming documentary about her life, Wrestling With Chyna, was released today, showcasing her rise and fall with WWE and the last few months before she left this world.

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The two-and-a-half minute trailer provides quite a bit of footage of Chyna in the eight months leading up to her death, including her battle with prescription drugs, which ultimately ended her life. In fact, the interview that opens the trailer was shot just a week and a half before she passed away.

The documentary's director Erik Angra told E! News he noticed her struggling and will forever wonder if he could have done more to save her.

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"In the last few weeks of her life, we all did become concerned that she was actually having a real problem," he told us exclusively. "We reached out to the management and we reached out to her lawyers. They were all scrambling trying to get her help and that's something I'll live with the rest of my life. Just feeling like I didn't do enough and the guilt of that."

That's the type of emotional struggle we'll all feel in the documentary as well.

"The whole documentary is one big emotional moment. It's very, very intense," Angra explained. "[You'll see] her struggles with her personal demons, her emotions, and obviously as we found out some of her substance abuse issues...I think the documentary going to show the entire rainbow of emotion a human being can go through, so it is quite emotional."

That "rainbow" included Chyna's higher moments in which Angra described her as a "wonderful" and "brilliant" person.

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"She was a jokester. She was warm. She was friendly. She did impressions. She was a dork. She was just so much fun to be around," he told us. "She spoke five languages. She had a master's degree, played the cello and the piano. She was brilliant. She was a brilliant, brilliant woman, and she could've done anything in her life."

Her biggest goal was to be an inspiration for other women. "She wanted to be the strong woman who was able to go in there and show she can do anything a man can do," Angra said. 

And she did just that, shattering the glass wall of what female wrestlers and women, in general, are capable of...but that didn't prevent her from feeling things on a very deep level, especially criticism.

"At the end of the day, even though she was so strong, tough, and able to pick up men above her head and handle all this criticism, inside she was still a fragile human being like the rest of us," Angra explained. "I just hope people remember her as a strong feminist icon, but also as a person who was human being."

Wrestling With Chyna has no set release date yet.