The Sessions with Renee Paquette, the former WWE interviewer/host, opened up about her decision to sign with All Elite Wrestling (AEW).
AEW President Tony Khan made the news official on Wednesday night before Dynamite. Here are the highlights:
The decision:
“I’m so excited to be back in the world of professional wrestling. It does feel like I left in the sense of like, being at the shows, working at the shows, being around the ring, shooting the sh*t with everybody, seeing what the creative looks like, all that stuff. I love that aspect. In the last two and a half years with us doing this show and of course, this show still goes on just as usual. Me joining AEW does not affect The Sessions at all other than getting more great guests, but actually, even to give a little nod about that is like AEW has always been so great to us for booking guests as is, so it’s already been an easy process. It feels so cool to just be back in this world. Like, yeah, we’ve been able to be here and do these interviews and you’re still hanging out with people. It’s through zoom and you’re having different conversations than you would have backstage. We’re not talking too much rasslin’”
“But now to be back in it, like God, I do miss it. I have missed it. For me, obviously, sh*t, we watch so much wrestling in this house. We talk so much wrestling in this house. It was always sort of like an odd, displaced sort of feeling anytime I went to shows with Jon because I’ve always used to being at the shows but working and being useful and contributing. So being there for the duration of Jon being at AEW and not doing that, and just like being there, being like Jon’s wife, and I’m just like hanging out and I’ll pop through catering and grab a bite and yeah, it’s just a different feeling kind of going there as a guest as opposed to now being like, oh my god, yay cool. I go here now.”
How her deal came about to be:
“So it’s kind of funny because as much as I had been around a lot, I’ve really never talked to Tony about coming into AEW. This is probably going to sound bad and I’m sure people are going to take this out of context, but honestly, a lot of it was talking to Jon, of being like, man, like, I want to be back in the wrestling world. I miss being around it. I miss doing stuff. As he’s thinking about what the shows look like, and his role on the shows and all that, like most of our conversations were internally between Jon and I about figuring out like, yeah, I want to do something. I want to come back. I don’t know what that conversation is. How are we going to go about that kind of thing, and him and Tony are obviously very close. They spend tons of time talking about things. So I think it was more so like them talking about it.”
“I think a lot of people just thought that I was sort of done with wrestling to a degree and maybe they didn’t want to ask me to do something that they thought that I didn’t want to do, or they didn’t want to step on Jon’s toes or any of those things. Those are all very real things that could have been. But yeah, I think like, it was just the timing of everything. I want to be there as a broadcaster, as a personality. I want to be able to help other people if they want help or need help on things. I want to be an ear for people in any way that I can and use my eight years experience having worked in WWE to see how I can sort of help an AEW now.”
H/T to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription