AEW superstar and former TNT champion Darby Allin recently joined Renee Paquette on her Sessions podcast to discuss a wide range of pro-wrestling topics, including how his friendship with Sting developed, and how his parents feel about his dangerous stunt work. Highlights from the interview are below.
How he feels after taking lots of dangerous bumps:
“I feel amazing, actually, and I’ve been jumping off washers and dryers on the concrete since I was four. I feel really solid actually. I’m so extreme about physical therapy. I want to be as crazy for as long as possible. So if you ever see me at tapings, I’m always in the doctor’s room, not because I’m messed up. I like to do maintenance like dry needling and acupuncture and a lot of yoga.”
Explains why he lives in the woods without TV and wifi:
“I want to blow sh*t up and not be bothered. I want to jump my house and not be bothered. There’s a lot of things, like just freedom, but no TV and Wi-Fi. I feel like I could turn my mind off because I’m really into meditating a lot. There’s a lot that goes into it. The moment I’m around TV or Wi-Fi, I kind of feel trapped, and it feels like there’s like a rat race going on, when I would rather just fu*k off and live in my own world and that’s what I do all the time. A few people come over, and then when they see the place like, they’re like, ‘No wonder you don’t feel the need to go on Twitter. You’re doing all this weird sh*t all day.'”
What his parents think of his stunt work:
“They’re there for all of it. My mom and dad were there when I jumped my house. It was so funny because we jumped the house for the pilot of my reality show called ‘Darby’s Days Off.’ So we had this reality thing where like, what does Darby do on his days off, and it’s just like this gnarly sh*t. My parents were in the whole pilot. It was following them around. It was super fun. They were there. My dad and my mom has been there since the beginning with all the gnarly sh*t that I was doing in high school and jumping off, like with skateboarding and stuff like that, so they’re used to it. They’re so hyped on it now that it paid off. It’s so weird, because like, back in the day, I was able to just go crazy, and if I broke my ankle, cool, whatever, I could just chill. But now I’m on AEW and people don’t know how gnarly it is to balance out skateboarding and wrestling. I have such passion for skateboarding that you couldn’t pay me to stop skateboarding. There’s no way I would ever stop skateboarding. There’s not enough money in the world to make me, and I mean that because there was a point in my first year in wrestling where I just stopped skateboarding because I thought I had to dedicate 100% of my time to wrestling. So I stopped doing a lot of things and I was just wrestling. Then for some reason, I was so depressed. I was like, man, like, I’m forgetting who I am as a person. I wasn’t doing stunts. I wasn’t skateboarding. I was like, man, something’s missing, and the moment I picked back up the skateboard, I was like, it was this (the skateboard). I’ll never put you down again. With wrestling, I love it, but it’s so weird to say, but I don’t feel like it’s my true calling in life. It’s skateboarding.”
Talks his friendship with Sting:
“People say, ‘Oh, so you guys are together because you just paint your face.’ But it’s crazy what people don’t see behind the scenes, like how much we get along. During the pandemic, I would change in the boiler room. Like, that was my spot. I would shut the door and just be in the boiler room. Then one day, Sting walked by, and he’s like, ‘Why are you in this boiler room.’ I was like, ‘I just like to be in my own zone. I don’t know, like my own world, like to get away from everything.’ Then he’s just like, ‘Alright, well, my locker room is your locker from now on,’ Ever since then, even when we went on the road, he’s just like, ‘Your locker room is my locker room.’ We have such, you know, stuff outside of the ring. It’s cool, but no one gets to see that. When we’re paired off now, it feels super right, but in the beginning, I have no idea, it’s funny because they’re like, ‘Alright, you’re gonna sit in the rafters for a couple of weeks. I didn’t put two and two together. Then they said, ‘Sting is gonna debut.’ Oh, cool. I’ve never met him. Then I started talking to him and then he was watching all my promos. He’s like, ‘Dude, don’t change a thing. You’re doing awesome.’ Then they asked me to be paired with him and it was awesome to play a part in his final chapter.”
(H/T and transcribed by WrestlingNews.Co)