Saraya recently appeared as a guest on Busted Open Radio for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling and AEW.
During the discussion, the leader of The Outcasts faction in All Elite Wrestling admitted to being rusty on the microphone when she first came back, reflecting on her return promo and the one line she wishes she could take back.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where she touches on these topics with her thoughts.
On being a little rusty on the mic following her company debut at the Grand Slam Dynamite back in September: “I was so mortified by the promo myself that I actually second guessed coming back altogether. ‘Did I just make a mistake? Did I make myself look so awful?’ People like Dean Malenko was like, ‘You went out there, you said on the microphone that you were nervous.’ I really was. I was terrified. I have never been so terrified in my career. Even when I debuted, won different championships, I was terrified, but not as terrified as coming back after five years, going to a different company in front of a new group of fans, in front of all these people watching you and they want to see you fail or do good. There was a lot of eyes.”
On how she redeemed herself in a promo with Britt Baker, one that former three-time AEW champion Jon Moxley helped her out with: “I wanted to come across more, ‘is she a good guy or a bad guy too?’ Just the way I delivered it, it wasn’t my proudest promo I’ve done. If I had to own up a promo, which I ended up having with Britt, I had to redeem myself. Moxley helped out a lot with these promos. With that one, he was like, ‘Speak from the heart. Stop trying to plan a promo out in your head. Speak from experience and more personal’ without taking low blow jabs just, ‘I’m a star.’ Then it was, ‘who is the babyface and who is the heel’ with me and Britt. We decided it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to have a definitive babyface or heel.”
On the one thing Saraya wishes she didn’t say was that “she finally had a boss who would listen to her in AEW,” adding that WWE was always good to her during her time there: “The one thing I do wish I didn’t say, I got asked to say a certain sentence, the sentence where I was like, ‘Finally, a boss that listens to me’ I wish I didn’t take that low hanging fruit. I’ve always spoke highly of WWE because they helped me a lot. I love AEW. There is no reason to take that low hanging fruit and I feel that caused a lot of tribalism and negative reaction. There are some things you wish you didn’t say, and that’s one of them. I feel it would have gone smoother if I wouldn’t have said that. I understand why people were made, ‘but I’m playing a character. Be quiet.’”
Check out the complete interview at SiriusXM.com. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
