AEW star Stokely Hathaway recently joined the Talk Is Jericho podcast to discuss his heel faction in the promotion, The Firm.
The group debuted at the 2022 ALL OUT pay-per-view and helped MJF win the Casino Ladder match to earn a future world title opportunity. However, plans changed when CM Punk got injured (and suspended) and the group disassociated with MJF shortly after. Hathaway tells Jericho that it was a tough few months for everyone involved in The Firm at that time, especially since the original idea to start the group was not his.
I guess I didn’t view it that way because I’ve been trying to get into the habit of looking at things from a positive perspective. Regardless of who was in that position, the idea was to go after the world champion. We still had that opportunity. It didn’t, obviously, turn out like the way that most of us wanted, but it was still an avenue to get things going. It was a tough few months to try and figure out ‘what is this group?’ because it wasn’t my idea.
Hathaway then explains that he decided to push The Firm into more of a comedy direction, one that he believes has helped them survive on regularly appear on AEW programming.
I didn’t come up with the concept. The only thing that I really had input in was the name. We were this super serious heel group, and I think you have to read the room, and I made the conscious decision to go, ‘Okay, this isn’t working, let’s go to the comedy route.’ Not full on comedy, but if you go back and watch, you can see where things started to change for us, and for the better.
Elsewhere in the interview, Hathaway discussed his AEW debut at Double or Nothing 2022 and how he was just on a handshake deal at the time. You can read about that here.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)
