Trent Seven was the latest guest on Edge & Christian’s Pod Of Awesomeness; he spoke about taking pride in NXT, breaking into wrestling, acting and much more. Highlights and the full podcast are below:
How do you feel about NXT UK being WWE’s first international brand?
“Yeah, definitely. There’s a massive amount of pride. You can feel it through the product as well, especially in the in-ring performances you see on the Network. There’s a lot of pride. It kind of feels sometimes when you look back that it’s almost like your life’s work. Having this extremely prestigious title that has been made, globally recognized that has been made by Tyler, Pete and now WALTER. Just being the first-ever extension of the North American arm of it as well… It all came around very sharp and there was a bit of a detour as people were working out the logistics and how it was gonna work. Hats off to Tyler and Pete for putting on the caliber of matches and claiming that title the way they did. It’s a very proud thing to look back on and obviously to carry on with.”
Who did you wrestle that broadened your horizons?
“The first person that comes to mind is Kyle O’Reilly. This was about 2011, I think he’d been wrestling for about a year at that time. He came over as a recommendation from Davey Richards. At that time, I was living and working as a manager of a pub. He was the first international or ‘real’ wrestler I’ve ever wrestled. He had his own kicks with his name on, and he’s a real wrestler.
He came over and we had a great time. The day before the show was supposed to happen, the fire marshals came to the venue and said we couldn’t do a show where we had been doing it. The next 24 hours was just me and my mate trying to find a venue to do the show. We found a nightclub called The Planet, and we turned everything around in 24 hours. About the point where I said ‘OK everything is done’ was about 2 ½ minutes before my music played and I had to go out and wrestle Kyle O’Reilly. I’ve always heard of these veterans saying ‘we’ll call it out in the ring’ and I was like ‘you’re full of it, no one’s ever done that.’ We went out there and he just battered me for about 25 minutes and somehow, someway, it just kind of clicked for me. ‘Oh, this is actually wrestling.’
It just felt like whatever was happening and based on the crowd’s reaction you would do something else to either get a reaction or stop the reaction and that was it. There’s that epiphany moment where the crowd was booing and I fought back and they stopped booing and cheered. It was just simple, simple stuff where he was the baddie and I was the goodie and we fought each other until someone won.”
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