In a recent interview with the In The Kliq podcast to promote her appearance on VH1’s The Surreal Life which premieres tonight at 9pm Eastern, former WWE superstar CJ Perry (fka Lana) discussed several topics, including the Rusev Day storyline, being put through a commentary table for nine consecutive weeks on WWE RAW and more.
Highlights of the interview are below:
On whether she feels that the Rusev Day storyline ended too soon: “The simplest way of putting it, for all of the listeners that might not be as familiar with wrestling is, Vince McMahon was the director, the Steven Spielberg of our show. Just like any television show or movies, there’s casting, it comes down to the executive of the network to the showrunner, and if they see you, if they want to cast you as a villain, you know, that’s their choice. I think at the end of the day, Vince loved Miro as a villain, so that was really the bottom line of the struggle was that he wanted him to be his Bulgarian Brute, 300 pounds, crazy, killing it. It was his company, still is, and that was his creative vision, and I think that was always the conflict of it all really, to come down to the bottom line. I can have a ton of opinions, but it’s show business at the end of the day.”
On being through the commentary table on WWE RAW for nine consecutive weeks: “Ironically, I really enjoyed it, I mean yeah, it definitely hurt, you’re going through a commentary table, which is much thicker than a normal table, a beautiful Samoan Dragon is dropping you and landing on you, so there’s nothing that doesn’t hurt about it, but I mean, that’s why I wrestled, it is painful, but I love it, there’s nothing like it in the world. It just happened to be that Miro had did a podcast that day, and it released that morning and he was asked a question of like, do you think CJ will get punished for you and what you’re saying about AEW and about the company and then that night, I started going through tables. It was just a coincidence, but then the fans and that’s why I love our fans, they had my back and they were like, screw the WWE for punishing Lana, so they decided to run with it, they were like whoa, I think we can get her over as a babyface now. That was never originally the intenion, but they just kept on going with it and running with it and I was like cool, there’s a story here and Nia and I had great chemistry. It was very much a David vs. Goliath story, and I think people understand that type of story, so I’m very, very thankful.”
The full interview is available at this link.
