Sonny Kiss recently appeared on Talk Is Jericho and discussed several topics, including his TNT Championship match with Cody Rhodes and the origins of his ring name. Here are some highlights:
On his match with Cody Rhodes:
Kiss: “I feel amazing, in the sense that I know I proved myself. I know I proved the haters wrong, I know that I proved to myself that I can be a force to be reckoned in a main storylin, and it was just really hot, it’s really, really tough to wrestle in… 90 degree weather, like it’s really intense.”
“Overall, I loved it, it was an amazing match. It definitely definitely had the fans like, ‘Oh my god, Sonny Kiss can go,’ so it was really, really awesome.”
On how he reacted when he learned he was getting a TNT Championship match:
Kiss: “Honestly, like for the first couple of days, I could barely sleep. Just because I know there was like work to do, I knew like I had something to prove, like everybody’s counting on me, so people were probably expecting me to fail, people were really expecting me to really show the world. So it was like, ‘Okay, what is he gonna do? Can Sonny Kiss pull this off?’ So for the first like couple of days it was like rough, but in a good way, a really, really good energy but nervous.”
On how he broke into the wrestling business:
Kiss: “I started managing in 2011 and then I got into wrestling between 2013-2015, like actually wrestling, having matches. But it was very inconsistent at that time, I didn’t really get a chance to really do much because …I wasn’t training as much, like I didn’t start training really hard until 2015-2016.”
On how he landed with AEW:
Kiss: “So Brandi slid into my DMs, I always say it like that, it’s always so funny. She messaged me, she goes, ‘Are you signed anywhere?’ Like, ‘Hi Sonny, it’s nice to e-meet you, we would like you to come to a show,’ I think it was May 25 was Double or Nothing. So she was like, ‘Yeah, are you signed anywhere?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, but I can still do other bookings.'”
“Thankfully [with Lucha Underground,] we were allowed to do everything but the other company, so I was able to still do it, but I didn’t get my official contract until way after. That contract issue, I don’t even want to get into that for legal reasons. It was a nightmare.”
On where the Sonny Kiss name came from:
KIss: “Sonny is the nickname to my real name, do you want to hear that? So my real name is Hassan, very Middle Eastern, and yeah, Kiss came from, I think because I was blowing kisses a lot when I would come out in my entrance.”
The full episode is available here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/42rI7Y7vGkgAON2LIag9q2
