Pro-wrestling star Joey Janela recently appeared on Renee Paquette’s The Sessions, where the Bad Boy discussed a number of different topics, including how his pairing with Sonny Kiss happened in AEW, and how Cody Rhodes (now in WWE) paid for the duo’s vignettes out of his own pocket. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
How his pairing with Sonny Kiss came to be and how Cody Rhodes was instrumental in making it happen:
“Cody. I think he was just throwing shit at a wall. There was a big show coming up in Jersey at the Prudential Center. That was the one that got canceled due to Covid. They were like ‘what do we with Joey and Sonny Kiss? It’s a hometown gig for them. Let’s just team them up.’ So that show got canceled and eventually with Covid, I think Cody was like, ‘let’s just roll with it.’ So I said, ‘oh, I got this idea for vignettes.’ They’re like 1980s like Miami Vice, but the dynamic is so different because I’m the cis, white male, and Sonny Kiss is the flamboyant representative of the LGBTQ community. And I wanted to tell a story where I was down on my luck, that I did these matches with Moxley, I did these matches with Omega, that were world-renowned. Everyone was talking about them, and Covid happened, and I was in shambles. Sonny Kiss is like, ‘I’m from Jersey, you’re from Jersey. Let’s get back on our feet together.”
Says Cody paid for his vignettes with Kiss out of his own pocket:
“So Cody, out of his own pocket, paid for these vignettes that seriously took like 15 hours to film. They showed it to Tony. Tony hated it. Tony thought they were phony, fake. He hates it, hates the invisible camera, hates the cinematic stuff, which they’ve done a lot more, but maybe it’s just because it was with me and they knew I was actually going to get over this time. Everyone loved it, and we got it on TV, like a certain kind of edited-down version of what we put out, and still it just got people talking about it, like all over. It was trending on Twitter, this video. Eric Bischoff, he was watching and said, ‘That was one of the greatest promo videos I’ve ever seen in my life.’ He said, ‘This was really awesome.’ But that wasn’t the intensions Tony had with us. So, he didn’t like the video, and from there we kind of just like, you know, we wrestled Brodie [Lee] and Colt Cabana, and I think it was one of Brodie’s first matches on TV. We did that, and that was it.”
How his angle with Kiss eventually came to an end:
“So Cody let me create this whole storyline where I broke up with Sonny. I would just go to QT or Cody or whoever, and, really, Dark is not Tony’s priority. It’s just to pad the records for storyline purposes. So I would go to Cody or I would go to QT and say, ‘All right, this is what I’m doing this week.’ And they’d go, ‘Okay!’ And I did that and there were a couple weeks where they didn’t bring me out to TV and it went on way too long, but the payoff was good with me and Sonny. And unfortunately, I beat Sonny in that last match because the plans were to bring me and Kayla back to TV. So Tony was like, ‘All right, you go up and that’s it. We’ll bring you back to TV.’ But situations happen, and who knows what would’ve happened.”
(H/T and transcribed by WrestleZone)