Kevin James' talks about 'Here Come the Boom'

BOSTON (WHDH) -- When you think of Kevin James - you don't usually think of mixed martial arts - but that may be about to change:

James stars in "Here Comes the Boom", playing a Boston teacher who moonlights as an MMA fighter, to raise money to save his school's music program.

This is his 4th film that was shot in or around Boston.

“We love Boston, I mean, obviously...yeah, I did, almost all my movies there pretty much, and we continue to do them, because the people are great, it's real folks, and the people I connect with probably the most so, it just felt great to do it there. My boy was born there,” said James.

James played football in college - but training like a UFC fighter was beyond anything he'd ever done.

“It was brutal. We did a lot of sparring; we did a lot of everything. Training like these guys - I wanted it to be as realistic as possible for an everyday shlub like me to be able to actually enter in at the lowest level of the UFC to make that believable, so we worked really, really hard. And I had the greatest instructors coming in and helping me out - bunch of the UFC guys, and it was fantastic,” said James.

As hard as James trained for the film, he's not quite ready to join the UFC just yet.