Apollo Crews has fond memories of his Nigerian Royalty persona during his 2021 Intercontinental championship reign.
The WWE star spoke about his old gimmick during a recent appearance on Ryan Satin’s Out of Character podcast, where he reveals that former WWE champion Big E, who he was feuding with at the time, actually planted the idea in his head. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Says Big E gave him the idea to show off his African roots during their 2021 program:
When the idea was presented of getting in touch with my roots, it’s funny because I was talking to Big E one day. It was when we were kind of going into the WrestleMania [37] program and he said, ‘You know what I think would be cool? Is if you kind of brought any type of African heritage onto TV’ because at that time, there really wasn’t any African representation. Since then, there’s been Omos of course that’s also representing Africa as well but I told E, I said, ‘You know what? I would love to do that but I know the first thing that they’re gonna want me to do is have an accent’ (Crews laughed) and then when that idea was presented, I heard the first thing that came back was, ‘Is he gonna have an accent?’ And I was like, geez. Why is that the first thing that comes to anybody’s mind when you’re talking about playing an African character or anything like that? But, this is my job. If I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do it to the absolute best of my ability and that’s what I felt like I did, and I wanted to be respectable with it, you know what I mean? I didn’t know what the feedback would be. It’s like, here’s this guy who isn’t really that in touch with his roots, who doesn’t know too much about his actual heritage, portraying a character that may not be seen in a positive light to a lot of African people or Nigerian people so, dealing with that was kind of, you know, that was a whole little issue in itself but again, at the end of the day, this is a job and I was gonna do the best job that I can and make sure that I was able to bring this character to life.
Talks the feedback he got from WWE co-workers and personnel:
A lot of the feedback that I got from my co-workers (about the ‘Nigerian Royalty’ persona), it was amazing. I don’t think anybody had seen me in that light. It was kind of like, you know, Apollo, he’s this nice guy and everything but no one’s really seen me angry or seen any different side of me besides smiling… Probably all the time, I’m in a great mood, smiling so, a lot of, I just don’t think people honestly thought I was capable to do anything outside of what they saw so, it was nice to get a lot of feedback from some of the guys that I work with.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)