NXT women’s champion Charlotte Flair spoke with Sports Illustrated ahead of tonight’s showdown with Io Shira on NXT on USA. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Her take on her mini feud with Liv Morgan:
My take was, when I first found out about it, was we had three segs [television segments], with a promo and a match, that is a huge chunk of time. That’s an opportunity to highlight Liv, highlight myself, and it’s much more time than we were given before. I went out there thinking, ‘How can I give Liv the best performance knowing she is the next big thing? Having the promo and the two segs, I don’t think people realize how much goes into that. I’ve had those reps, she hasn’t. I know people were disappointed she lost but, at the same time, it makes you go, ‘I want more for her!’ Now you want more for Liv. Sometimes people forget this, but you can’t slay the dragon on the first night.
Her WrestleMania matchup against Rhea Ripley:
When you think of my dad and Shawn [Michaels] and their WrestleMania match, you normally don’t think of a great crossbody off the top or a moonsault. The one thing you remember from that match is Shawn going, ‘I love you, I’m sorry.’ With these empty arena shows, my first goal is to set myself apart from everyone else. How do I do that? How do I make the audience forget that there’s no crowd? And how do I do that with an opponent that’s never been on a WrestleMania? I just tried to go in very calm and be more vocal trash-talking Rhea the whole time. To me, there has to be even more intensity without the audience. Normally, when you’re watching at home, you can feed off the crowd. Now you can only feed off the two talent in the ring.Going into this match, I didn’t want to think, ‘Man, we don’t have an audience’ or ‘It’s too bad we’re not at the Buccaneers’ stadium.’ This was an opportunity to separate ourselves and bring intensity, emotion, and storytelling. Watching a movie, there is no audience. I wanted to do that as a performer, so that’s what I thought entering the match. Our match was all about two women physically telling that story, aggressively. That’s what I want people to take away from our match.
Whether the NXT women’s title is the most prestigious in WWE:
Well, I think so. And I meant what I said in the build-up package to the Mia Yim match. Raw and SmackDown have great divisions, but when you look at NXT’s women’s division as a whole and really look at the collective years and experience, that’s what makes this division so deep. I’ll use the Four Horsewomen [Flair, Sasha Banks, Bayley and Becky Lynch] as an example. I have no years of experience except for what you’ve seen on TV. I grew up before your eyes. But wrestling Io, she’s wrestled all over the world. This is a different kind of performance for her—WWE is different and the style is different, but that’s what makes NXT so special. It’s that level of experience.
What she thinks of Io Shira:
I want people coming out of this match thinking, ‘Io is going to run this division.’For me on a personal level, not that I’m comparing Io to Trish Stratus, but I’m feeling that same amount of pressure. I feel pressure before every match, but when Trish came back and wanted to wrestle me, all I could think was, ‘I hope I live up to her expectations. I hope I’m as good as she thinks I am.’ Multiple have told me I’m Io’s dream match, and she’s said that herself, so I hope I’m the same Charlotte Flair she sees me as in this competition. That’s the pressure I am feeling going into this.