In a recent episode of The Sessions podcast, Renee Paquette discussed several topics, including her decision to sign with All Elite Wrestling.
“It’s missing being around professional wrestling, it’s missing that TV aspect of doing things. I miss the crowds, I miss the lights, the outfits, and the aspect of putting on an actual show. I’m ready to get out of my f***ing sweatpants is what I’m saying. As much as I have been around a lot, I never really talked to Tony Khan about coming into AEW, a lot of it was, this is probably going to sound bad, and I’m sure people are going to take this out of context, but honestly, a lot of it was talking to Jon, man I want to get back into the wrestling world, I miss doing stuff.
As he’s thinking about what the shows look like and his role, most of our conversations were interally between Jon and I about figuring out that I want to do something and come back, what that conversation is, how are we going to go about that. Him and Tony are obviously very close, they spend tons of time talking about things, it was more so them talking about it, because I think a lot of people thought I was sort of done with wrestling to a degree, and maybe they didn’t want to ask me to do something that they thought I didn’t want to do, or they didn’t want to step on Jon’s toes. Those are all very real things, it was just the timing of everything. I want to be there as a broadcaster, as a personality and I want to be able to help other people if they want or need help. I want to be an ear for people any way that I can and use my eight years of experience having worked in WWE to see how I can help in AEW. It all happened really fast, all of a sudden Jon and I had been talking about it and it felt like the next day, my manager is calling me saying they’re reaching out, the contract is coming through like wow, that was a quick turnaround.
During all of this, I’ve not even talked to Tony all that much about it, just because there’s not much that we need to talk about until now I’m there. The lead up is cool, he knows my skillset and knows what I’m bringing to the table and it’s more of a let’s get you in here and start working and we’ll figure it out as we go. He knows what I bring to the table in terms of my years of working in this world and the stuff that I’ve been able to do outside of wrestling, it’s a figure it out as we go kind of situation. It sounds vague, but it’s not like I’m main eventing anything, I’m going to be out there conducting interviews and being a personality for them. As those opportunities come up, and we know that’s the narrative that some of the storytelling is going to be told, I can come in and help out there.”
The full episode is available at this link.