Bayley recently spoke with Ariel Helwani for an interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Bayley discussed her character’s transformation from babyface to heel:
“It was all my idea when it first happened. I was in, I don’t know if you remember, it was such a weird time in my career where it wasn’t really going where we all thought it would and I felt the fans turning on me already and just not buying into it. I didn’t want to just kind of coast along. I knew when I joined WWE and when I wanted to be a wrestler, I wanted to be able to do everything. I wanted to be bad, be good, have this match, do, I wanted to do everything and ride that wave of WWE. I felt it was a perfect opportunity. The last match I had before the change was, I forgot the pay-per-view, but I lost the championship to Charlotte and then I had to break down and cry. They told me just to throw a fit and cry and cry. I thought it was so strange, but you know, I did it and I just told myself, ‘I can’t come back the same Bayley’. I talked to Vince and I talked to my writers throughout this whole idea of a complete 180 character change. He’s like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do it’, but it was like two days later so I had no time to really figure out what this is going to be. Then we did that change and then it’s just grown throughout the years now that I’ve had time to kind of settle in and see how the fans react to it.”
On her ambitions for herself in Damage CTRL:
“That is something that I’ve thought about for a couple years before it actually happened. I know Dakota has talked about this in her interviews in the past. It had a different group of people as the time went on. Peyton Royce was someone that I really wanted in there. Tegan Nox was someone that I wanted in there. There were a lot of people that it just kind of changed throughout time and as people left the company and things like that, but Dakota was always, she’s one of the OG’s that I always envisioned in this group.”
Wanting Damage CTRL to be called The Now:
“I had a few different ideas. We threw out a million different names. Creative came back with a million different names too and we just couldn’t get on the same page. Then you have to also go through legal and all this stuff. My first original one, I wanted it to be called. ‘The Now’. To me, it was that I didn’t care about the championships I won in the past, I don’t care about what happens next, like these girls right here and what we’re about to do, the present is all that matters. The Now was my first idea, but there’s a show called The Now or something like that. You know, it’s just legal stuff.”
Whether or not Damage CTRL would exist if Triple H did not take over creative:
“No. Not even close. I didn’t know any ideas that they had for me (when she came back from her injury). Even if I asked creative, they weren’t really sure because they were waiting until I was 100% clear, so I had no idea what I was doing. To me, I feel like I would have just fallen back into the same place that I was. Not that that’s a bad thing, because I didn’t get to do anything with the fans, you know. So it is still all being new to me and I would have turned it up a million. But this, to me, is what I wanted and what I needed, even in my career, not just to help IYO and Dakota and the division. To me, it just adds another layer and another piece of evolution to my character and to show a different side of me.”
If Mercedes Mone asked her to go to Japan to support her:
“I went there on my own. There’s a few of us that flew out there just because like, she’s been there for all my big moments. Even as she hasn’t been a part of the company and I’ve made my return and I’ve had my big matches, like she’s there for me, so of course I want to be there for her. We’ve done so much together in WWE. She means so much to me and so much to the wrestling world. Like, I have to be there for this moment. I literally flew out like right after RAW, got to Japan two hours before the show started and raced over there and met everybody there and sat in the crowd incognito. It was so magical to be there for her and I just knew how important it was to her.”
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
