WWE star Karrion Kross recently appeared on Out of Character with Ryan Satin for an interview covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Kross was asked how much of his true self is in his wrestling character:
“Very, very little. Very little. I find it more therapeutic from a performance standpoint to completely step outside myself and play something, in this particular situation for this company, larger than life. I’ve always wanted to get into a character to bring to life for people that they’re not gonna be able to see anywhere else.”
Kross described his wrestling character:
“Karrion Kross is definitely not an underdog. If given any sort of power whatsoever, this is a very authoritarian tyrant type individual who is less like a human being and more like a bad energy in the room that just loves to stir bad things up in people. He likes to attack people’s identities and makes them doubt what they’re actually capable of. He wants to emasculate them and embarrass them publicly and wants to beat them up in front of their friends and family.”
Regarding if he was apprehensive about returning to WWE, Kross said:
“I wasn’t apprehensive at all because I just feel like 99% of your success in this industry comes down to your ability to compose yourself under stress and pressure. I knew coming back, I felt better with myself in terms of feeling confident to shoot down an idea, a theme, or a project that I just knew wouldn’t work.”
“The NXT run that they gave me, it was a murder run. They literally had me clean out everybody and everything, complete, clean kills on everybody. I had no reason to believe that anything would become weird or not work out or something like that. This is the one thing they’re asking me to do finally that I’m not totally 100% on. In my mind, I was thinking how foolish it would look the one time they asked me to do this thing if I said no. I mean, all of that was in my head at the time.”
“Coming back, I didn’t have any of those things to be worried about. I was out there outside of WWE. Financially, my wife and I were good and we were having fun working on different projects and stuff like that. We’ve always loved working for Hunter. He’s the easiest boss that I’ve ever had in terms of like, being accessible to discuss ideas with and stuff like that. But also on the flip side, he may not tell you this, but you know, excellence is expected. He has a very high standard for all of his talents. While he’s easy to talk to and he’s everybody’s favorite boss, we all know that he expects us to bring it and I think that brings out the best version of all of us. I think that’s one of the main reasons why people like to work with him.”
You can check out the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
