AEW women’s division star and Chief Brand Officer Brandi Rhodes spoke with Sportskeeda to talk all things pro-wrestling. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Whether AEW’s success was a surprise to her:
“I knew that we had a great team that we were pulling together to create AEW. When you have a really great team and you’ve got the right mix of folks all together, I think that you kind of expect things to go well. Things have definitely gone much better and faster than I expected, and that’s because I’m very realistic in that I set goals that are pretty attainable, I don’t go too far. That makes things, like what’s happened in the last year, year and a half, really great because I did not think that within that first year TNT would grant us another hour of content. I did not think that they would re-up our deal that quickly, and our merch sales have been so amazing.”
On how the company is fairing with the television ratings:
“Every time I hear the numbers reported weekly, I’m just blown away. I wouldn’t say that I set a low expectation, I think I set reasonable expectations and we surpassed that. So maybe now’s the time for me to up those a little bit to see how we do.”
Proud of how diverse the AEW roster is:
“As far as our talent goes, we’ve never done that. We’ve never had to do it, which is really really remarkable and it speaks to what the wrestling landscape looks like today. If you’re not having to search and find a demographic, it’s all just right there and available, and there are all these people who are fantastic in-ring, they bring characters, they bring a lot of life to wrestling…We’ve actually been pleased. We take a look around sometimes backstage and these were just the people that we wanted, regardless of how they old are, what race they are, gender or whatever. It’s really been nice and, again, that just speaks to wrestling being so much more diverse these days than it’s ever been.”
