John Bradshaw Layfield is happy to put some space between his WWE on-air character and his real-life personality.
John Bradshaw Layfield and Gerald Brisco recently spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about their show, Stories with Brisco and Bradshaw. The show debuted on YouTube and recently migrated over to Podcast Heat in November, and Bradshaw spoke about being able to have an outlet where he can not only reminisce with Brisco and their guests about various road stories, but he can also do it without having to perform as his “JBL” character, who was an over-the-top heel for most of his run.
“It’s a welcome relief to not have to be kayfabing all the time. My character was such an over-the-top character that I’d tend to blend that character and inflate it a little bit with the real John Layfield just to try to not have too much disparity between the two. It’s now great to be able to say, ‘you know what, that’s the character, that’s one I played, it’s fictitious and here’s me’ and now I can say that, especially being out of the ring, not just with kayfabe kind of being dead but also being out of the ring for so long, it doesn’t really matter anymore,” Bradshaw explained. “That’s why we enjoy talking about stories that are 20 years in the past, and now wrestlers can come on and say ‘here’s what was happening backstage, here’s what happened in the ring, here’s what we were thinking of the time’ and they would never have done that then and they probably wouldn’t and maybe even shouldn’t do that now.”
Bradshaw also spoke about enjoying wrestling history, as well as having a way to educate fans about the past with their new show.
“Gerry and I enjoy the history and he lived a lot of the history but we also enjoy the history. It’s interesting to me, ya know, Stanislaus Zbyszko, that stuff is interesting to me. People say, ‘oh, this is something new’ and some of it is new, but very little is new. Very, very little, it’s almost all happened before. You look at the business, some guy goes over, the other guy goes over or there’s a DQ, there’s really only three things that you can do, so nearly everything has already happened. It kind of makes the world a little bit smaller and makes it make a little more sense.”
Stories with Brisco and Bradshaw airs on YouTube and on your favorite podcast apps including Apple Music. Watch our full interview with Gerald Brisco and John Bradshaw Layfield below.
Read More: Brisco And Bradshaw Share Road Stories, Aim To Entertain On New Podcast
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