Simon Miller is gearing up for one of the biggest matches of his career to date, taking place this Saturday, Decemeber 30th as part of PROGRESS Wrestling’s annual Unboxing event at the Electric Ballroom, London.
The match is against Tate Mayfairs, a man Miller lost to at last year’s Unboxing event. This year the two take on one another in a street fight that is going to be brutal.
PWMania.com‘s Lee Tarrier (@leeseedub) caught up with Simon in the run up to this match to discuss everything from his time hosting PROGRESS Wrestling shows, his love for Ups and Downs at What Culture and his future ambitions as an in-ring performer.
You can check out the complete interview below:
Your feud with Tate Mayfairs begun at last year’s Unboxing and will end this year with a street fight. How do you feel going into it?
Well, it’s funny you say that because in many ways the feud begun in 2019 as me and Tate had been fighting across the independent Britain wrestling scene since then. I remember getting off a plane after I’d been in America for a week and I went straight to a show and I took him on as I wanted to kick his ass.
This isn’t a work. Between me and him, there’s a personal nature to this feud. It has spanned multiple years, spanned multiple promotions, but there is something awesome about getting to draw a line under it at the end of the year in 2023 with PROGRESS Wrestling, because if you had told me a few years ago, that’s where it’s going to culminate, I’m not entirely sure I would have believed you.
And as far as I’m concerned, as soon as it is done, that’s it, we’re done. We’re moving on. And I hopefully never have to see him again. That sounds like a wonderful, wonderful Christmas present.
You’ve wrestled a few times for PROGRESS now, alongside being their lead ring announcer, how did it all come about working for the promotion and how do you find the gig?
So I was I was wrestling up in Liverpool with TNT and after I’d had my match, I heard a couple of guys wanted to talk to me and it was Martyn and Lee. Of course, at the time I didn’t realise it but they were the new owners of PROGRESS, so we jumped on a zoom call a week later and they just said ‘Listen, we are doing a big revamp, a big restart and obviously the old guard has moved away, so we need some new people to come in and take their roles. Would you like to be the guy that hosts?’
I was obviously hosting wrestling content online so then to get the chance to be affiliated with progress in any sense was was more than enough for me, especially because many times throughout my career so many people had said they would not want to be associated with a ‘YouTuber’.
I saw that if you get to be affiliated with PROGRESS, it’s a foot in the door, right? It’s a foot in the door. It’s a way to get your face around to meet the right people. And hopefully it can just evolve from there. January will be two years of doing it and I’m very, very happy and very, very appreciative that it has gone well and that itdid kind of evolve the way that I that I hoped it to, moving into the ring to perform and as we go into 2024, the balance of hosting to wrestling may shift in the other direction.
You clearly have grand ambitions, and rightfully so, to wrestle more and in more places. What are your ambitions as a wrestler?
I do have a little bit of a plan. I don’t have any grand ambitions apart from the obvious ones. You know, people always say oh, you know if a big company signs you , would you go? I mean, of course.
But I am a day to day guy and I will see how it goes. But the 2024 written down in my head is you know, let’s face bigger opponents, let’s face people that have crazy amounts of experience. I’m probably the underdog, right? So I then think, can I then get better as a wrestler, test myself, put myself in uncomfortable positions?
And that’s what I want to do next year for sure.
Balancing your role between content host, ring host and wrestler is respected. Does your profile help or hinder you when looking to go further in the business?
I like to try and stay as humble as I can. But let’s not pretend otherwise. My debut in professional wrestling was for Defiant, which was basically WCPW 2.0, nobody should be debuting in a company of that size and I got in the ring, and the first person I saw across me was Mark Haskins. It’s like this is the strangest debut ever.
So, no way am I’m ever going to rag on my YouTube stuff. It gave me a foot in the door. It gave me an opportunity that I didn’t deserve because I totally believe you have to work for certain things. I just worked at it a different way. And again, it was there. It’s helped me and it still helps me today.
It’s why if I get put on a show, nine times out of 10, It’s What Culture’s Simon Miller and I feel truly blessed to have that, but everything has it’s ups and downs, I know haha, but you have to take the rough with the smooth, which is why I think balance is the best possible word.
Of course I want to be the best professional wrestler I can be but I always want to be the best host I can be I want to be the best YouTuber I can be. I got into acting over the last few years. I want to be the best actor I can be. You know, I’m very much inspired by people that wear multiple hats. And I think that’s kind of a reflection of where we are in the modern day.
Of course you want to be able to dedicate yourself to one thing and sort of live and breathe that thing. But the space that I find myself in it’s just that’s just not how it works. You know one man band is very much a used term, and I pride myself on that a lot. I just want to be as good at all those things as I can possibly can.
With a hosting hat on, how did you feel when beginning the PROGRESS hosting gig, especially in front of a passionate crowd?
I was lucky in the sense that I wasn’t nervous about the hosting side. Just because I’ve been doing that since like, you know, 2014, 15, so I had the experience of doing that.
The difference obviously with the crowd when I begun in January 2022 was that this crowd were very used to Jim Smallman. He had smashed it in that role for many years. He was the foundation of PROGRESS.
So it’s very intimidating in that sense. It’s difficult shoes to fill and I didn’t want to be a parody. You don’t want to be a copycat because people see right through that stuff. So, I literally had two different sort of scripts in my head. One was to go in one direction if the people were kind to me and if they’re not, I would go in another direction.
But I think I’ve always kind of been a guy that as long as you’re prepared, you can handle anything. And I had prepared myself for the show, however there was some apprehension there.
After about an hour, everyone knew the deal, saw the direction I was going and were great, and have been great ever since. I wanted to bring something different and unique and people seem to have enjoyed it and that’s my job.
If I am able to wrestle more in 2024 and I have to leave the hosting behind a little bit, I will miss it a lot. But again, as we talked about, if a brand new opportunity comes up, you jump into and never stay comfortable, let’s always keep moving forward.
From the fantastic roster, who are some of the names you would like to take on?
I will throw some names in there because it is crap when someone doesn’t but I won’t say some names and they should absolutely be on the list. I mean, pretty much every single show I’ve done, you could take any one and say that you want to face them.
I’d love to take on Spike Trivet as it would be brutal and scary. And that’s different to taking on someone like Leon Slater and I wonder if I could hang with him.
I mentioned Mark Haskins and now he is back in PROGRESS, that would be great. You’ve got a big man in Bullit, Charles Crowley would offer a different style and approach. There’s Big Damo who has been excellent, the Lykos guys, just so, so many, and this is why PROGRESS is so cool.
Because you could turn up to any show and be booked against someone who will test you in a different way to the last. I mean, maybe getting in there with someone like Luke Jacobs, he would try to take my head off, but I would love to, I would really, really love to put myself up against those guys. And if I come short, that’s okay. That’s how we learn and that’s how we get better.
Miller vs Tate is going to be brutal. Simon said it’s not a match you would want your kids to see, so expect violence of the highest order to end a long standing feud.
“PROGRESS Chapter 161: Unboxing VI and a Movie” takes place this Saturday, December 30 at 3pm. Tickets are available by clicking here.
