AEW star Eddie Kingston discussed kayfabe in wrestling during a recent Q&A with AdFreeShows.com.
“I think that the business is going backwards in a sense of you guys, the fans, you know everything already. You know the magic. You know there’s bookers. It’s all been exposed for years now. And I was a fan at that time when it was being exposed, and I was so into it because we had never seen that before. I remember ECW they were talking shit about WCW, and WCW was talking shit about WWF or whatever. And I had never seen that before because when I grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s, they did not talk. Not the big companies. Maybe the lower territories that I wasn’t getting, but the big companies never did. So everything got exposed. Cool, you know everything now. I believe people are done with it. People don’t want to hear us on Twitter bitching and moaning about what’s going on backstage. People don’t want to know how much fun I had with my opponent that night in the ring. I believe they want to see that, no, we still don’t like each other. They want to be lost.”
“And I put it in this sense: the Marvel movies, whether they’re good or bad. There’s been a lot of bad lately, right? They still make millions to billions of dollars. Now imagine, and I’ll use this example. Imagine if Captain America stopped in the middle of the f**king movie and said hey man, I didn’t really kick that guy’s ass. We’re actually going to go out later. I respect to shit out of him. He’s the stuntman. And then they will go, okay, back to the action. It would ruin it. So I believe now people want to go back to, I guess you can say, the kayfabe days. You know what I mean? And the reason why I kind of believe that too is I’m not gonna put over Chris Jericho. People are like, how was your feud? What do you mean? I hated him for seven months. It was the worst time of my life.”
