AEW superstar Bryan Danielson recently appeared on the Sports Illustrated Media podcast to discuss a wide range of topics, including what AEW’s approach to promos is and how it compares to the creative team in WWE. Highlights from the interview are below.
How AEW handles promos:
“I was actually a little bit blown away because the first time I had to talk or anything was in Cincinnati and I was like, ‘what are we doing?’ [Tony Khan was like,] ‘I don’t know, what do you want to do?’ ‘Wait, what?’ In Newark, it was the same thing.”
Says he enjoyed working with the writers in WWE:
“I was never handed a sheet of paper or told what we’re doing. We kind of sit down and decide what we’re doing. I was like, ‘Oh.’ Then there’s this overachieving fear for me a little bit because some people don’t like working with the writers. I love working with writers. I like collaborating. I had a really good time with that. One of my favorite times was when I was the Planet’s Champion. The writer I worked with was named Robert. We had so much fun. He would present me with a piece of paper. I had a lot more leeway than a lot of people in WWE. I would work with the writer and say, ‘What if we say this?’ Robert was great because he would pull me back from the edge, sometimes I’d go off on a tangent and he would say, ‘Hey, this is too far environmental and maybe not focused enough on the show we’re actually doing.’ Robert helped me stay on track. Eventually, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about the environment at all, but Robert was great because he would throw in little things there. I loved collaborating with the writers. There’s a real fear of the blank page. You have to craft your own story. You want that freedom, but then all of sudden it’s like, ‘Oh no, here is this blank page, you can create whatever you want,’ and you’re like, ‘Uhhh,’ and that’s a little bit nerve-wracking.”
Talks working with the creative team towards the end of his WWE run:
“My last couple of months with WWE, I would get scripts, but my time with WWE was pretty much that; always working with a writer but always collaborating. In the last couple of months, I was part of the creative team a little bit. Very rarely would I do my own stuff, but I was like, ‘What if I said something like this?’ I might have said that on a Tuesday then show up on Friday and it would be somebody else’s words, but a version of what I mentioned. We’d flesh it out, work together, and it’d be fun.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)