During an interview with Sam Roberts, Karrion Kross opened up about his initial run on WWE’s main roster in 2021.
Kross said, “I was really surprised because I wanted to get the most I could out of NXT and do my best work. I wasn’t by any means trying to phone anything in, but I was trying to demonstrate a type of work rate, ethic, and character IQ to go to main roster. I feel everybody is trying to do that. I tried to develop something that I thought would work on the absolute biggest stage while I was there.”
“When we went up and it was dismantled, I had tons of people telling me different types of theories and reasons as to why it happened. None of them had to do with me. I just didn’t know what to do. I had this thing in the back of my head of, ‘they’ve given me a pro wrestler’s dream run in NXT. Now they are asking me to do this one thing that I think is absolutely stupid. I should probably just do it.’ In my head, I thought, ‘How ungrateful, how silly would it look, as a professional, to say no after I’ve been given so many unique opportunities?’ That was my mentality at the time. There was so much uncertainty and many weird things going on. I thought the outfit looked cartoony. I spoke to some people and they were like, ‘They’re considering doing Halloween costumes.’ That’s weird. Who wants to dress up as that? I thought, ‘Okay, they want to merchandise this. This is an opportunity for me to demonstrate, on a measurable metric, that I can draw a unique revenue for the company that maybe other wrestlers can’t.’ I tried to lean into it as much as I could. Even the writing team was like, ‘We need to get you out of this.’ I agree. They tried a lot of different things.” (quote courtesy of Jeremy Lambert)
You can check out the complete interview below:
(quote courtesy of Jeremy Lambert)
