WWE star and former NXT women’s champion Rhea Ripley was a recent guest on the Metal Injection Squared Circle Pit podcast to hype up WrestleMania 37, where Ripley will be challenging Asuka for the Raw women’s title. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
On ideas for her merchandise and how she’s super excited about the direction they’re going:
I was super excited. So, the first shirt that I have, they have the Rhea Ripley one with the sort of metal writing and the chains. But the one after that with my face on it, I actually designed that one so I got shirts from like Suicide Silence and I was like, ‘This look is really, really cool and I wanna make something like this but I wanna use this photo of me that they took with my tongue out, I want all this stuff. I want this sort of font’ so I sort of, I had a little input with my shirts which is really cool and now they just sort of like keep making them but they know what I like so I put that first input in and now they understand me so they keep making more and they’ll go through me. They’ll be like, ‘Which one do you like?’ And I’ll be like, ‘This one, definitely this one. People will love this.’ So that’s what happens with the shirts and the merch designs and all that.
Says she was supposed to be on the first NXT UK tapings but she popped an eardrum:
I was on the first Mae Young Classic. That was my official debut and that was two weeks after I moved here, and then after that, it was the second Mae Young and because I did so well in the second Mae Young, they wanted me to go to NXT UK and I was like super excited. I remember I was supposed to be on the first tapings of NXT UK but I actually had a popped eardrum so I wasn’t allowed to fly. But I went there for the tournament for the NXT UK Women’s Championship and I had no idea what was going on. No idea, no one told me anything. I was just like yeah, yeah, I finally get to wrestle. I was just super excited to wrestle because I hadn’t been on TV except for the Mae Young Classics.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling
)