AEW superstar Malakai Black recently spoke with Click Orlando about his House of Black faction, how the idea for the group started, and why he decided to bring in Brody King and Buddy Matthews. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
How the House of Black took off with fans and gave him the idea to bring in more members to the group:
I coined this idea of House of Black and it was actually kind of incidental. It happened during my iteration with Cody and the start of my path in AEW where in week two or three, I kneeled down and told him, ‘welcome to the house of black’ and it transpired with fans and started popping up online. I went, ‘this is taking a life a little bit. There might be more to this.’ A lot of times, fans dictate the path you take. We listen to what they want and you adjust accordingly. I always had this idea, even prior to being a member of AEW, I’ve been in wrestling 22 years but taking it back 13 or 14 years, I was in factions that had similar vibes, a vibe like this. I was no stranger to this and it was my comfort zone. I started coining this idea and I had a conversation with the man in charge and said, ‘this is what I’m thinking, these people are who I’m thinking. How do you feel about it?’ He loved the idea and it became a collaboration between myself and Tony where we would have several meetings in regards to what vision I had and he would add on to the vision.
Talks bringing in Brody and Buddy specifically:
Slowly but surely, I had different approaches for Brody and Buddy because they are different individuals coming from different places and known for different things. There’s a way, psychologically to approach fans in regards to letting them understand what it is that they actually want where one was more something that I would repeatedly feed to them through social media, matches, and promos. The other one was more of a last-minute ‘wait, is that?’ And give it to them. It was a meticulous way of approaching Brody and Buddy to bring them to the foreground. In both cases, a massive success. The target we were trying to reach is what we reached in terms of what we did on TV, the reaction after. In terms of trending and how big the reach was, even now, how many people are still talking about it. A lot of planning and thinking, but because I had prior iterations of how I wanted to do this, I had ideas of how to bring this to life, which helped me a lot.