AEW President Tony Khan was a recent guest on the AEW Unrestricted podcast to hype up week two of the company’s Fyter Fest special, and discuss the rise of one of AEW’s top stars, Orange Cassidy. Highlights are below.
On Orange Cassidy’s feud with Chris Jericho:
Frankly, we haven’t seen anybody get to Chris like this in a long time but we also haven’t seen a wrestler get so popular so quickly out of nowhere,” Khan noted. “It’s been a lot of fun working on it. A lot of it we’ve worked on, and and tried marketing him and building such a fun character. He’s an enigma and he had such a great presentation coming in. Nobody really believed in, it I felt like, outside of a core group of people.It’s been really, really fun building something from the ground up with Orange Cassidy because, outside of the really hardcore wrestling fan base, there probably weren’t a lot of people, every week, that were tuning in to watch him at first.
Building up Cassidy’s first singles matchup against PAC at AEW Revolution:
If you look back to 2019, a lot of people don’t remember this,” Khan recalled. “Before there was a Death Triangle and before there was the idea of PAC and the Lucha Brothers vs. Orange Cassidy and The Best Friends, they were already experimenting with this idea trying to set up, eventually, PAC and Orange Cassidy in the matchmaking when I booked PAC and TH2 (The Hybrid 2) in a match with Orange Cassidy and The Best Friends. The idea was to put some backstory out there with PAC and Orange Cassidy for the long run when it was time for Orange Cassidy to finally have a singles match. But we subtly built up for a long time to his first singles match because he was either a manager or he did some six-man tags. And he was in a couple battle royals, but he hadn’t, until Revolution, ever done a singles match.
PAC and Orange Cassidy’s first meeting at the Dynamite in Kansas City:
I remember in Kansas City, I knew that one way or another after The PAC-Kenny Omega Iron Man match that after they went the distance, that Orange Cassidy was going to be coming out to challenge PAC,” Khan recalled. “I had told you before we did it that they’re going to chant, ‘He’s gonna try. He’s gonna try. He’s gonna try.’ The Best Friends are going to hit that line. The jokes gonna be on PAC that he’s gonna try. Just watch, it’s gonna work. And at that catering table, there was some doubt at the table whether this was actually going to work. Boy did that work really well.
Cassidy being a genius and brilliant in-ring performer:
An actual genius of a person. If they only knew that his ideas in terms of execution, presentation [and] putting together a wrestling match. He’s such a great technician in terms of bell-to-bell wrestling, but also just in terms of the little details he puts into his character.
Full interview here. (H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)
