Edge recently sat down with For The Win to discuss a handful of topics, including his upcoming match with Randy Orton at WrestleMania 36, why he believes that having no crowd will help, and how his acting career has actually helped him prepare for this moment.
Check out some highlights below:
On how the lack of a crowd might help in his match:
You know, out of all the matches, I truly thing it affects us the least. I think the story that Randy and I have told is so personal and so – I’ve been using ‘grit’ throughout this whole thing – but gritty and dark and kind of twisted, that I almost feel that it doesn’t affect us. And may actually help us, strangely? Because a Last Man Standing match in a football stadium, you know, I would want to take the thing everywhere. But you have the possibility of losing your audience when you take it backstage, away from the audience, now they’ve got to look up at the screen. Now they’re craning their necks. Now we have the full freedom, it’s a blank canvas. Now we can do anything.
On WrestleMania 36 moving to the WWE Performance Center:
I think we’re at a time where… everything’s so in flux and everything’s so strange right now. I guess if I’m looking at it purely from a performance aspect, you go ‘ahh.’ Because you love being able to be in front of an audience, feed of that, the adrenaline of that and all those things. Then I started looking at ‘OK, well this is where we are. This is normal for now. So what are the challenges here, and how can you adapt and still make a compelling story?’ I get off on the challenging aspect of it, and that’s how I started looking at it. So if I’m cutting a promo, well now I’m doing theater. I’m doing a monologue to a camera. And that was fun! That lets me explore my acting chops. So that’s how I tried to recalibrate my brain with it.
On Randy Orton:
The first time I met him, I still remember it, I really do. That meeting where Bob [Orton] introduced us, and I just remember thinking ‘hey, he’s taller than me.’ And thinking that he’s got all the tools by just looking at him. You know, he’s a good-looking guy, all of those things – but you don’t know what they bring to the table from an in-ring aspect. The first time I saw him work, I went ‘OK, he’s special.’ And then the first time that we ever actually wrestled against each other was for the Intercontinental title, and pretty much from the get-go, from the first time we locked up there was just something different between us. And it’s either there or it’s not. You can work to get there with someone, but with him and I that spark was immediate. And I’ve had it like that with maybe one other person.
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