Jon Moxley was this week’s guest on Talk Is Jericho and the former Dean Ambrose talked about his exit from WWE. Moxley says that he’s never been happier, and that “the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders.” He says that he is grateful for how WWE changed his life and that he met his wife there, but he was very frustrated creatively and knew he wanted to leave as far back as last summer.
“I knew, I pretty much knew I was gone in July of 2018 and at that point I was out with an injury. I tore my tricep and normally that would only like a four month thing, but it was so banged up and bruised cause I had been working on it hurt for a long time and the tendon was all mangled and everything so it was a minimum like six months. Then I got staff infection, then I had to go into surgery again, it turned into like nine months, it was a mess. Very miserable time in my life. Very challenging.”
Moxley says he was counting down the days until he could leave, but knew he wasn’t going to quit because he’d lose his royalties. He says he knew he was completely gone after one specific day, but first explained his frustrations with getting put in situations with ridiculous promos that made his character look like “an idiot.”
“So one day I come into TV like normal. At this time, I think I’m on SmackDown, I’m a good guy, a babyface. A pretty major good guy on the show, basically the lead good guy on the show at this point. I come in and get a backstage promo handed to me from a writer—writer is going to be a key word in this podcast you will find and the word script—I get a script handed to me by a writer, right? And it’s a backstage promo and it’s me describing the things I did on the way to the arena that day,” Moxley said. “These are things that an idiot would do. Like things along the lines of like driving backwards on the street in a unicycle or sharing a pizza with a homeless man on the street, just weird stuff like that. So I’m like, ‘I’m not saying any of that.’ So I’m like, ‘Change all that. Rewrite it just as something normal.’ Go about my business, writer comes back to me later. Vince redid it, put all that stuff back in, so I’m like, “Uh, now I have to go in and talk to Vince.”
I’m like, ‘Yo, I can’t say all this stuff, it’s ridiculous.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, it’s such good shit! Oh, this stuff, this is the reason people like you. It’s why they connect to you cause you’re different – this is you!’ And I’ve had a million conversations with him that are almost this exact same conversation about similar promos or things.
And I said, ‘So I’m an idiot?’ And he goes, ‘No! It’s you! You’re different.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay.’ And I don’t know where we landed on that particular promo, whatever, but that kind of sums up the battle I’ve been fighting for six years.”
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Moxley went on to detail his final heel run where he was feuding with Seth Rollins, saying he was supposed to have several backstage segments, but he was most concerned with the final one in the ring. He critiqued this one as being ‘absolute hot garbage, awful crap’ that you can’t make any sense out of it, and Jericho notes that he remembered being there for it. Moxley says there was a joke about a pooper scooper that he wanted to change, and detailed how the creative process works with changing promos. Moxley said there was a change to something about him saying “I wouldn’t come out without a gas mask” and that the phrase would come in to play later in the podcast. He says Vince re-wrote the promo and added more about the ‘smelly people’ and a surgical mask, as he had previously seen the part about the gas mask. Moxley says he was told he had creative license, but it didn’t seem that way and he feels like he didn’t accomplish anything with that whole night of promos because of the addition of the goofiness and the mask.
Moxley says the second story he wanted to share is the day he knew he was leaving, and recalled the promo where he got vaccinations to ‘protect’ himself against the dirty fans. He says he had a conversation with Michael Hayes about not being excited about the promo, and still tried to make the best of things. Moxley says he thought that would be it, then talks about how he always thought there would be the ‘one thing’ that he couldn’t recover from.
“Remember what I was saying about the one line in the previous promo, the week or so before? This promo also had a line regarding my actual friend [Roman Reigns] who is going through actual leukemia that Vince wanted me to say. He tried talking me into saying it. This is where I absolutely drew the line. I was like ‘absolutely not’ and he actually tried to talk me into it a little bit, but I was like ‘absolutely not.’ He’s like ‘oh, if you feel uncomfortable with it, that’s fine,’ and that’s where I finally had to put my foot down.
It is the worst line—I’m not going to say it on air. I’ll tell you after we’re done, but I’m not even going to say it on air, that’s how bad it was. It would have been like a thing where somebody would have had to get fired. Maybe me. They would have lost sponsors. Susan G. Komen would have been like—and I don’t know who wrote it, Vince himself or if it was a writer, if you’re listening right now, you should be ashamed of yourself. You wouldn’t believe it. If I would have just said it, been like ‘OK’ and read the script, I can’t imagine. But it would have been on me, not on Vince. Anyway, so that’s that day. Those are just two examples in a day of the life of me.”
Moxley also said he was feeling creatively braindead even as far back as his feud with Jericho (and Mitch the potted plant), feeling like ‘they were trying to take the wrestling away.’
Transcription credit to Dominic DeAngelo for Wrestlezone.com
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