AEW President Tony Khan recently spoke with the PW Torch podcast to discuss all things pro-wrestling, including the character transformations of superstars Adam “Hangman” Page and the Dark Order’s John Silver. Highlights are below.
Says AEW was beating up their big stars too much:
Getting back to our bread and butter wrestling was good. We were beating up some of our big stars too much. We put a lot of resources into people and had to re-look at our stories and where we were at with them.
How he’s told talent like Hangman Page and John Silver to channel their characters from Being The Elite:
For me, a big focus — I try to look at other sources peripheral to AEW like Being The Elite for ideas. I saw Hangman on Being The Elite doing his drunk character. He had never done that on Dynamite. I was like, ‘That’s Hangman from now.’ We’re almost a year into it and it’s completely changed him and he connects with people in a different way, he’s a more three-dimensional wrestler. There was a connection between him and the crowd that he still needed to get. We found it and now he has everything he needs. It was already within him. It’s similar to John Silver, when I saw his character on Being The Elite and I said, ‘This is what you need to do on Dynamite, this is going to connect with people.’ There are things like that where we need to change the presentation of people.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)