The latest guest on The Sessions podcast was AEW star William Regal, who spoke with host Renee Paquette about a variety of subjects, including being on board for the changes NXT 2.0 eventually made and how he feels about WWE moving away from bringing in indie wrestlers. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says he was on board for NXT to go through some changes:
“That [change to NXT 2.0] were happening from last summer and it was the perfect storm and then Paul got ill. I was all on board for the changes. We did Portland NXT in 2020 and we all came out after that night, didn’t matter what was going on, everyone has a different story. 2019, after the initial thing of another show starting, it was, if you want to think about trying to beat this, I’m not. There are 100 other people thinking about what’s going on somewhere else. It’s wasted headspace for me. I’m going to work on the people that work with us and try to help them get better. That’s just me. It’s just another day at work and everybody else that wants to gossip, it’s something for them to do and I’m just working for the company that I’m working for, I’m going to do the best job I can, and I get on with it. We came out of Portland, there’s all this other stuff going on.”
Talk his return in 2019 right before the COVID outbreak in the states:
“When I came back in 2019, there’s a lot more stuff going on, AEW is going on, I don’t have time for all that. I need to make NXT…I work here, let’s do this. 2020, we go into Portland and we come out and all the top fellas were coming up to me and going, ‘We’ve done this style to death.’ There were people trying to figure out, how can we change a bit of something because it’s going to be more of the same. There were a few little discussions like that going on and we were starting to think about that. Then, COVID hit and it was ‘never mind that, let’s just survive.’ The first five months, they wouldn’t let me go down there because I had this pericardiectomy.”
How NXT has moved away from indie wrestling:
“There were all these things happening and I was all for that fact, ‘Okay, if the boss doesn’t want independent fellas, now we have to get massive numbers,’ because you’re only going to get one out of every 50 or 100 that actually really wants to put the time in and love this and work and be there all day long, every day, trying to hone their craft. A lot of people talk a good game, but they don’t actually put the time in. There were a lot of things that I thought needed a kick up the backside because people are not paying attention and nobody had to tell me to go up to better wrestlers when I was younger and try to pick their brains. nobody had to tell me to work on everything that I could work on, that’s where I got to. I was all for the change, but I also get that if you’re trying to make a complete change, you might not think that…I don’t think anybody knew, but I was very open to the fact that I wanted to be a big part of that, and I was because I was very hands-on with the Creed Brothers and Bron Breakker. I had an incredible run on the main roster and I had the absolute greatest run possible in NXT. If nothing else, the time came when it was time to go now, so it didn’t become something I didn’t like and move on. That’s the way I look at it.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)