AEW superstar Malakai Black was the latest guest on Casual Conversations with The Classic, where the former NXT champion spoke about his current character incarnation, and how it’s connected to the his work in WWE and the independents. Black also admits that errors have been made about his character in the past, but that those are sometimes needed to better his character in the future. Highlights are below.
How mutual errors have been made regarding his character in WWE, NXT, and AEW:
So for me, the character work sticks and the wrestling progresses slowly. I… I wanna perceived as effective and efficient and sure, you know, and I’ll be the first one to sometimes also say that both in NXT and WWE and AEW, yeah, we’ve made some errors, we’ve made some mistakes but you know, you also need to make mistakes to realize what you’ve done wrong so you can correct it again. Nothing is always ever absolute, right? So it’s all about finding what you need to change and redoing it and sometimes there was decisions that I made, sometimes it was decisions that they made, you know what I mean? It’s just — but, you get this whole… you get this whole track record of all the things that you knew went well so you start building off it and a lot of times, young wrestlers ask me about that character stuff, right? And I always tell them, you know, ‘Try ten things out. If nine fail, well at least you have one thing that didn’t fail and from that one thing, you start building again.’
On his early conversations with Tony Khan regarding his character work, and how he wanted it somewhat connected to Tommy End and Aleister Black:
I had this conversation with Tony [Khan] at the beginning [that] was, ‘Everybody knows I can have crazy matches, you know? That’s not the issue.’ The issue is also not the character work but I wanted to give AEW something that was a… it was Tommy End, it was Aleister Black and now it’s this guy and you know, because a lot of people don’t realize that I got signed by WWE because of the Tommy End, cult-type character that I’d been doing for like years and years prior to that. If you look at my work in ICW and even also in PROGRESS a little later on, it was the exact same type of character, just not with as many bells and whistles because obviously, how I think about wrestling ten years ago versus now is obviously completely different, you know? And a lot of the ideas that I had back then were cool but now they’re great because now, I understand them better. It’s a journey, right? So I can convey them better to this audience.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)