Rising AEW superstar Ricky Starks recently joined Comicbook.com to hype up his world title showdown with MJF on next week’s Winter Is Coming television special, a match Starks earned after winning the World Title Eliminator tournament.
During the interview, the Absolute One discussed his creative process for writing promos, and gave his thoughts on the fan reaction to the epic promo he cut on MJF from this past Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite. Highlights can be found below.
On the creative promo process and how he wrote his entire promo for MJF showdown:
I think you’ll hear a lot of wrestlers say, ‘Oh, I didn’t think of it. I didn’t plan it out, I didn’t write it out.’ And Cody [Rhodes] makes the same joke, but that’s bull. Even the best promos had to have some type of structure to them. And I am somewhat in the same way, admittedly. I’m not one to really pull back the curtain on anything here, but yesterday, earlier in the day, I had wrote out this whole thing, and in my head memorized it and did all this, and stressed myself out, and then had a match to do. Anything could have gone wrong where I just forget it in the match.
Says how, like Jon Moxley, he will just throw things out in the moment:
I remember Max cutting that promo and saying these comments, and in that moment I was like, ‘I’ll just wing it. I’ll just wing it. I know where I want to go and what I want to get to, and I’ll just fill in the blanks.’ So what you saw out there was me winging it. That’s how I operate. Yes, I can come up with some lines and think about it, but for the most part, whatever I feel, I just say, and it comes off in that moment.
Talks fan reaction to his promo:
I’m not a stranger to this type of reception to a promo I’ve done. Earlier in the year, after I lost the title to Hook, I had a similar promo. The common theme between all that is it’s just me really speaking from the heart in every single instance.
