New Day on Staying Fresh, Breaking Up, Miss Being Heels, & More

The Undefeated held a recent interview with the New Day discussing staying fresh as a group, thoughts on people wanting them to break up, if they miss being heels, and more.

On the topic of staying fresh as a group, Xaiver Woods stated it is due to them having the mentality of not wanting to be stuck in a specific role and treating their characters as their real life counterparts.

“It’s the mentality of we’re not necessarily playing specific roles, we’re just being ourselves. And it’s the same idea of — I’m sure you have friends and you’ve been friends for years, and it’s not like your friendship has gone stale, you just find new things to talk about, you have new inside jokes. Things happen that you see on the internet, GIFs or funny videos; we talk about those. It’s just a collective friendship, and that’s what we are. We don’t try to think of necessarily new bits to do on the show or new comedy things to do. It’s just us doing what we do in the car [driving to the next town for a show]. Because that’s where the inspiration is when we just do what we do as normal humans. That’s a very refreshing thing for a lot of people, just because they see us being happy and that kind of goes through the television camera, through their TV and into their homes. And it’s a warm feeling of friendship.”

On the topic of people wanting the group to break up, Big E stated he considers it to be a terrible idea and they have no desire to split up any time soon. Both Woods and Kofi Kingston mentioned they have been more comfortable and better off as a group than as singles wrestlers for their careers.

Big E: “Uh, first of all, that’s a terrible idea.”

Woods: “We have a name for people like that.”

Big E, Woods, Kingston: “We call them wedge-drivers.”

Big E: “Trying to drive a wedge. Trying to break up the bond that we have going on.”

Woods: “For why?”

Kingston: “For what purpose?”

Big E: “You don’t like fun?”

Woods: “Something’s wrong with you. I’m having a blast with these two.”

Big E: “And as a trio we’re doing something unique. You could say there are other people that maybe in the past who were tired of that, but I feel like we’ve created our own lane in many ways. As individuals we’ll have a lot of success, but we originally saw ourselves as a faction, and we just ended up being in a tag-team division. We love tag-team wrestling, but all of our goals individually can still be achieved as The New Day. I don’t think there has to be any kind of breakup whatsoever. I’m reminded of what we did a couple of years ago when Woods and I had defended the tag titles, unfortunately unsuccessfully, at [the ‘Money in the Bank’ pay-per-view], but Kofi was in the ‘Money in the Bank’ ladder match, and in the time leading up to that Kofi would have a singles match and Woods and I would be doing tag stuff. That would be a lot of fun to go back to doing more stuff like that where one of us can pursue a singles title and the other two can still be in a tag team. There’s a lot of stuff we can still do as a collective but still achieve individual goals. To why we would ever break up, I don’t know what the point of that would be.”

Kingston: “It really wouldn’t make sense because three is better than one. It doesn’t make sense.”

Woods: “It’s just a logical choice for us to just stay friends.”

On the topic of if they miss being “bad guys” and getting to roast crowds, both Big E and Kingston recalled their favorite moments during their time as heel group. Woods stated it is an idea they have considered revisiting at some point in the future.

Big E: “That was a while ago. I was thinking about being in Baltimore and [Orioles outfielder] Adam Jones was there — not ‘Pacman,’ the baseball player — and I remember looking over at him. I think we ripped him. I remember we were in Pittsburgh, we had the Terrible Towels and being able to slide that across my … you know the area. Man, we had some good times.”

Kingston: “We talked about Chip Kelly being a grown man named ‘Chip.’ One of my favorite things to do is to be able to berate children, being the ‘bad guy’ coming out there yelling at these kids and threatening to ground them was some of my favorite, favorite stuff. That’s what it’s all about. We go out there and you see kids really getting into what we do, so to go out there and kind of have a little fun with them and hopefully at the end of the match they get their way and they feel they’ve caused us to fall or whatever. I do kind of miss that.”

Woods: “It was a big part of everything, as Kofi said. Yelling at children that they should be doing their homework and them getting irate. But then it’s cool because you see everyone behind them that sees this kid interacting with us and losing their mind and they start doing the same thing; now everyone’s involved. It was a cool way to not just involve that kid, who’s going to remember that for the rest of his life, but involve everyone else who’s also paying money to come to this show, this interactive experience. It’s something we’re not doing right now, but we might get back to it.”

Other topics discussed during the interview included their thoughts on WWE partnering with Snickers for Wrestelmania 34 and being proud of WWE having several African American wrestlers be champions at the same time in late 2016.