From his career in the military to fighting MMA and now to television, the career path for UFC middleweight veteran Tim Kennedy has taken him to challenging, but rewarding, places all over the world.
Most recently, Kennedy has put the finishing touches on the third season of his History Channel series Hunting Hitler. Speaking exclusively to MMAWeekly.com, Kennedy discussed the series, its latest season, his thoughts on returning to fighting, and an upcoming TV project that could very well be the end of him.
Firstly, Tim, tell us about Hunting Hitler and how you got involved with the series.
Hunting Hitler is not a misnomer. We assembled a group of investigators to dive into the possibility of Hitler and his fellow high-ranking Nazis after WW2 ended escaping out of Berlin, going to places like Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Columbia, and Brazil.
Season Three, we do a little bit different. We took on a few more investigators. One is from the CIA, who did targeting for them. And we applied the same approach we used to capture (Osama) Bin Laden, Sadam (Hussein), Pablo Escobar, and that is to look at the associates – the ones we knew got out – and follow their trails and their connections, and see if it led up the pecking order.
I’m kind of the lead field investigator. I was hired because of my real life skillset. I’m a terrible actor. They wanted somebody who spoke Spanish, that knew South America, that had hunted humans before, knew how to fly drones, and how to use ground-penetrating radar. There’s about me and a few hundred other dudes that have that skillset, so they hired me for Season One, and now three years later we’re still at it.
Has there been any way your career in MMA has impacted your work on Hunting Hitler?
Some of the ways that I kind of got into the Neo-Nazi circles in South America was through fighting. I was trying to get inroads to these communities to get information. The best way to do that was go into these kind of fight clubs and finding the guys with the SS tattoos and swastika tattoos and choking their brains out. For some reason, it made them be endearing towards me.
Having had your last fight over a year ago, do you see yourself returning to MMA anytime soon?
I don’t know. I’m still very competitive. I’m still training full time, two times a day, six days a week. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life. Obviously, my performance (in a third-round TKO loss to Kelvin Gastelum at UFC 206) in my last fight was horrendous. I don’t need the money from fighting. The only reason I’d want to fight is to prove I was one of the best in the world.
Everything would have to be perfect. At 38 years old, I can’t be scheduled to fight at a card and have an opponent fall out, add another month to my training camp, and then look like toilet when I step into the Octagon. I don’t know if it’s something I ever want to risk again.
Thanks for taking time out for us, Tim. Before we go, can you give us any insight to your upcoming, currently untitled, television series and when we may be seeing it?
This is my last season with Hunting Hitler, and I’m going to do my own TV show in a different world, and it’s not doing anything that I don’t do. I’m still just myself: a hairy troll that is alright at fighting and alright at stuff that could get him killed.
I love to be challenged, and this new project is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life; more so than the Special Forces, more so than Ranger School, more than deployment and fighting. This is going to push me past anywhere that I’ve ever been, in ways that I don’t think anyone could imagine any person experiencing. You’re going to see me bleed. You’re going to see me hurt. You’re going to see me freeze. You’re going to see me starve. You’re going to see me fall hundreds of miles per hour to see if I’m hard to kill.
We’re in the dead center of filming it. We’re only two episodes in. I’m leaving in January to film the third and fourth episodes. We should finish filming in March. The first two episodes are in post-production, getting ready to go to the network. It’s scary, but exciting. The whole thing rests on my shoulder – success or failure.
