On November 4, 2021, Karrion Kross and Scarlett were released from their WWE contracts. On November 5, 2022, Kross was battling Drew McIntyre inside a steel cage at WWE Crown Jewel. A lot can change in a year, and fortunately for Kross, it did.
When Kross first appeared in NXT, he was presented alongside Scarlett as more than an unstoppable force. He was a mythic presence, someone whose ascendancy seemed an inevitability. Given his success then, it was hard for fans to stomach his presentation on WWE’s main roster. Kross sported odd ring gear, Scarlett was nowhere to be found, and he lost in 90 seconds to an aging Jeff Hardy. Fans were perplexed and dismissive.
Kross opened up about that experience, his fan support, the man behind the character, and a lot more in a very candid interview with USA Insider.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
How fans reacted to his main roster debut: “The support was everywhere. It was completely inescapable. I would be grocery shopping, at the gym, in the airport, in a parking lot, at a restaurant. Literally everywhere I went, I was always approached by dozens of people at least every week and they were expressing how upset they were about all of that.”
Being in demand following his WWE release: “Sometimes it is what it is. As a person, I tend to not dwell on negative situations or scenarios that I can’t really do anything about. I tend to constantly think about how I can recover from a situation immediately, both personally and professionally, and that’s exactly what I did. The day we were released we had almost 12 months of work lined up in almost 12 hours. The fan support, the industry support. We were really well supported throughout the whole thing when we were released.”
His respect for the fans’ attention to detail: “Take this conversation we’re having for example: People don’t forget. There’s a misconception that fans have a short attention span. Maybe in some regards they do, but when they see something they don’t like, let me tell you — they don’t forget. They absolutely don’t forget. And that’s why it’s so important to preserve continuity in our programming, and in sports entertainment in general. It’s important because the fans are invested and they do care. It’s part of our jobs to elicit an emotional response and we definitely don’t want to elicit the wrong response.”
What he hopes for when he’s on TV: “I am very much about showing the audience moments and stories where we can explore different aspects of the characters they’ve been watching for a very long time. I want to diversify our programming whenever I’m on. I want it to feel different whenever I’m on versus everything else you see before me or after me. That’s why I approach things the way I do, that’s why I work the way that I do, and that’s why I request to be produced the way that I do. The feedback that I’ve been getting from fans has been really good. The fans have always been my pulse, my radar on what I should be doing and shouldn’t be doing. And I’m being afforded the ability to really breathe that into my work through the current office I’m working for — and I’m just very happy for all of that.”
