CJ Perry, the former Lana of WWE, was a recent guest on the “In The Kliq” podcast.
During her appearance on the show, Perry spoke about Vince McMahon’s decision to end the “Rusev Day” run because he preferred Rusev as a heel. She also opened up about her storyline with Nia Jax in which she suffered going through tables for weeks in a row.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
Discussing Vince’s decision to end “Rusev Day”: “I feel that Vince had an idea of how he wanted — the simplest way of putting it for all the listeners that might not be as familiar with wrestling is Vince McMahon was the director, the Steven Spielberg of our show. And just like any television show, or movies, there’s casting. And it kind of comes down to the exec of the network, to the showrunner. And if they see you — if they want to cast you as a villain, you know, that’s their choice. And I think at the end of the day, Vince loved Miro as a villain. And so that was really the bottom line of the struggle is that, he wanted him to be his ‘Bulgarian Brute 300 pound crazy villain!’ I mean, it was his company, still is so, and that was his creative vision. And I think that was always the conflict of it.”
On being put through tables by Nia Jax over and over: “Ironically, I really enjoyed it. I mean yeah, it definitely hurt. You’re going through a commentary table, which is much thicker than a normal table. And you know, a beautiful Samoan Dragon is dropping you and landing on you, so there’s nothing that doesn’t hurt about it. But I mean that’s why I wrestled, like it’s not — it is painful. But I love it, there’s nothing like it in the world. And it just happened to be that, you know, Miro did a podcast that day, and it released that morning. And he was asked for a question of like, ‘Do you think CJ will get punished for you and what you’re saying in AEW about the company?’ And that night I started going through tables. It just was coincidence.
“And then the fans, this is why I love our fans! They just like had my back. They were like, ‘Screw WWE for punishing Lana!’ And so they decided to run with it, they’re like, ‘Whoa, I think we can get her over as a babyface now.’ And that was never originally the intention, but they just kept on going with it and running with it. So I was like, ‘Cool, there’s a story here.’ Nia and I had great chemistry, and was it very much a David/Goliath story. And I think people understand it, people understand that type of story.”
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