AEW star Eddie Kingston recently spoke with Daily DDT to hype tonight’s one-year anniversary special of Dynamite on TNT. Highlights can be found below.
Whether him signing with AEW was validation for all his hard work:
I wouldn’t say it validated it, because I believe my work is not over yet. It definitely felt good to get the phone call, of course. Especially during these times of the pandemic and everything. I wouldn’t say it validated. It felt good.
How humbled he was by the #SignEddieKingston hashtag after his match with Cody:
That was very humbling and surprising. I didn’t think that many fans cared, to be honest. It blew me away. I said this in other interviews too. I’m getting hit up and they’re telling me, ‘oh, you’re trending,’ and they think this is a joke, but I really didn’t know. I go, ‘oh, so I’m trending, does that mean I get extra money? Do they send me a check? Does Twitter send me a check for trending?’ I don’t know. I don’t get that kind of stuff. You could call me a boomer, I guess. I don’t know even what that is, but to me I didn’t know. God, was it humbling. To the point where, I think it was two weeks after everything and I finally officially signed, I was in Montana with my girlfriend taking a vacation and I just broke down crying. She was like ‘are you okay?’ And I was like ‘yeah, I’m fine, it just kinda hit me now that, okay, people do care, and now I have a contract.’ It just hit me that I’m on national television and I finally have a contract with a big company,” Kingston said. “And I just remember wiping the tears away and looking at her and just going ‘I love you, but now the real work begins.’ And she’s a BJJ black belt, so she was just like ‘yep, let’s get to work.’ And I was just like ‘oh, I guess I do have to get to work.’ So that was it.
On the creative process and having freedoms with his promos:
I really don’t have any creative freedom when it comes to what they want me to do, because I’m a very simple person. This is my job. I’m not gonna fight anything. This is my job,” he said. “You tell me what to do, I’m gonna do it. When they ask me ‘hey, Eddie, is this okay if you do this, this, and this?’ I tell them, ‘yeah, of course it’s okay.’ Because a month or two ago, I was selling my gear and thinking maybe I have to sell my house and move back to New York. So I don’t question anything, I just go with it. When it comes to promos, they let me have the creative freedom to get to the point that we’re trying to get to. They tell me ‘here are the bullet points, you just get there,’ and I’m like ‘oh, okay, cool.’ Also I can’t curse or anything on TNT, and they trust me with that.
Talks about his upbringing:
I was raised as an Irish Puerto Rican Catholic from the Bronx. As they would tell me, we always have to be humble and we have to be hungry,” he said. “I was always taught that being mixed during that time period I was born and raised in, like being a mixed kid now is easier, but when I was growing up being mixed wasn’t an easy thing. I was always made fun of for being mixed race, I guess you could say. Or, like I say, I’m a mutt. I wear it as a badge of honor now, but I also wear it as ‘okay, I’m always the underdog.’ No matter what it is,” Kingston said. “I could be World Champion, which is always the goal, but I will still feel like I’m the underdog because I’m like ‘well, I gotta do more.’