Interview: Jon Moxley on Talk Is Jericho Episode, Indies Scene, Dusty Rhodes Impact, More

Entertainment website 25YearsLaterSite.com held a recent interview with Jon Moxley and some of the topics discussed included his recent interview on the Talk Is Jericho podcast show, the current indies scene compared to 2011, the indies thriving despite WWE constantly signing away talent, signing with NJPW, and the impact Dusty Rhodes had towards his career.

On the topic of his interview on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast show, Moxley stated he did not leave WWE with a bitter mindset towards wrestling like CM Punk and only wanted to tell of his struggles with WWE’s creative process.

“A bridge is never burnt in WWE. Vince [McMahon] would have me back tomorrow and would love it if I came crawling back to him. I think Punk had a lot more personal animosity towards WWE and specific people. I don’t know every detail of his story and I haven’t spoken to him since he left WWE. His experience drove him to not like wrestling anymore, I think. For me, I wanted the exact opposite. I just got pro wrestling back after losing it years ago. I’m like “Whoa, I’m back in the game, here we go!” I wanted to make sure that people knew that there’s no bitterness and that my love of wrestling and my desire to perform for the fans, my desire to meet and exceed their expectations and my love for the fans has only gotten bigger. They have stayed with me through thick and thin and they’re going to follow me wherever I go. Now they’re AEW fans. They can still be WWE fans but they’re AEW fans too. Not trying to come off as arrogant but that’s a lot of fans that are now following AEW. We’re garnering a huge fan base and we’ve only done one show. It just so happens that the one show we’ve done was fucking awesome. Even if this whole thing goes fucking tits up and we never run another show, that was one helluva show. But we’re going to run more shows, a lot of shows. We’re running a show June 29th in Daytona Beach, Florida, me vs Joey Janela. That’s a beautiful, ugly mess [laughs].”

On the topic of the current indies scene compared to when he left in 2011, Moxley stated he considers it to be a “whole different world” compared to his past experience in the indies.

“It’s a whole different world. I never made any money back then, before I came to WWE. You would’ve thought I was some kind of hot deal on the indys, but I was making max, $100, $125 a night, driving all over the country. I only made money if I did a death match. That’s when I started bartering my health for money. Oh if you want light tubes, that’s an extra $200. If you want a bunch of blood, that’s an extra $100. If you want me to take a bump on barbed wire, that’s $500. My point is, the indy scene is totally different now. There’s Impact, Ring of Honor, New Japan is awesome now. Indy wrestling used to seem so bottom of the barrel. You would so rarely see a huge show but now I feel like you see a huge indy show every week.

When I watched All In last year, I didn’t know half of the guys. I had never seen them work before. I was gone a long time, eight years, in the WWE bubble with blinders on and that’s a thick bubble man. Three hundred days a year, no break, your body’s hurt. It’s hard to explain the intensity of a Monday Night Raw. People running up to you in a panic saying we need to do this, this and this before the show even starts. “We need to do a promo, Vince doesn’t like this line, oh we need to get that approved”. People running around, doing rehearsals and then once the show starts, you’re on live TV. It’s very demanding but I don’t give a shit about that anymore. Not my problem anymore. We’re going to be on live TV with AEW and it’s cool that I have that experience. Not everyone has worked live TV before and it’s different.”

On the topic of the indies thriving despite WWE constantly signing away notable talent, Moxley stated he considers it to be amazing. He also stated that he is not fond of Triple H’s current mentality of “buying the indys” since it can hurt a wrestler’s development, especially if it happens early into their careers.

“I never thought of that until you just said it but its amazing. I thought it was a bad idea when Hunter started buying the indys. You had Seth and me, along with Joey Mercury and we were able to sneak in a few key guys like Luke Harper, Neville and Cesaro. Once I was on the main roster and NXT started, which I wasn’t a part of, every week Triple H was taking an Instagram selfie with some indy guy. I don’t know if he was trying to make himself look cool and get some indy cred or what, or make NXT cool. He basically started buying the indys. I remember thinking that it might not be a good idea. Then where are all of these good ideas going to come from? If they signed Daniel Bryan at 21, he never would’ve become Bryan Danielson and you never would’ve had WrestleMania 30. If they signed Punk before he really became CM Punk, he never would’ve done what he did. If they signed me at 21, I never would’ve become anything good. I had to develop first before getting brought in.

Buying up all of the indy scene was the same as Vince buying up all the territories back in the day. There’s nobody left to cherry pick for talent. It’s amazing that even though they bought up the indys that it has repopulated itself stronger than ever. Makes you very optimistic about the future of pro wrestling. That’s probably the biggest difference between my interview and the Punk interview. He was basically saying fuck pro wrestling, and I was saying that I got my love of pro wrestling back. I want to wrestle everyone. Let’s drop all the bridges, get all the companies together and have a super show that sells out a stadium right now. Fuck it. The sum of wrestling outside of WWE is bigger than WWE. I feel like myself, the entire AEW roster and all of the fans are the same team, reaching for the same goal, to make wrestling awesome. To not be embarrassed to tell people you’re a wrestling fan because they’d say to you “oh that show with fart jokes and they poop on each other or whatever the fuck happens over there anymore”. If you’re a wrestling fan and you show someone some things from WWE, you’d be embarrassed. You’d want to bust out old VHS tapes to show them why you’re a wrestling fan because this isn’t it. I want people to be wearing an AEW shirt and have someone say “Oh you’re a wrestling fan, fuck yeah, me too”. When I was standing on that poker chip at the end of Double Or Nothing, I didn’t know when we were going off the air. I stayed up there but for some reason, I just wanted to take a fucking victory lap. Security did not appreciate it but I took a giant victory lap around the arena, off the air and I felt like I was with 12,000 teammates. We are all AEW. We have that common bond.”

On the topic of signing with New Japan Pro Wrestling, Moxley stated working in Japan was one of his main career goals.

“At the very least, it was always a bucket list thing for me, to at least have one run in Japan. Of all my favorite places I got to wrestle with WWE, the shows in Japan were always my favorite. I loved the fans, the culture, the respect for pro wrestling. It makes you want to stay in the ring forever. New Japan gave me a buzz shortly after I left WWE and without hesitation, I was in. To go back to Sumo Hall, with New Japan this time, I can’t wait.”

On the topic of working with Dusty Rhodes in WWE’s developmental system, Moxley praised Dusty for the valuable help he gave and revealed that his post-WWE videos were inspired by Dusty’s original vision for his Dean Ambrose character.

“I was privileged enough to be able to work for Vince McMahon and also work with Dusty Rhodes, who was the head of creative at FCW when I was there. I had a very great and fulfilling time there. I would sit in the office with Dusty in the afternoons and just shoot the shit, in between training sessions. We would talk creative and ideas and he was still able at that point in his life to get excited about an idea just the same way he did at his apex in the late ’80s. I was privileged enough to work for arguably the two biggest creative driving forces in our industry. I’ll never get to main event WrestleMania but I got to main event Starrcade in my hometown of Cincinnati and that’s right up there, the top for me. Even though it was WWE’s version, still, it was my hometown and Dusty created Starrcade. I didn’t look at Dusty as a mentor. There are no peers to Dusty Rhodes but he treated me like one. He had this vision of me, of how I was going to take over WWE. These vignettes would be in a smokey bar, the camera zooms in on my back, Dean Ambrose leather jacket, in the Viper Club. He called it the Viper Club but he meant the Viper Room. He had this vision of me as a Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, “you’re James Dean baby”. He literally saw me as the coolest person in the world; that’s how he pictured these vignettes and pitched them to me. Dusty saw me as the coolest person in the world and Vince saw me as an idiot. That’s the difference between the two.

Flash forward to my first promo I released after leaving WWE, the prison one and I knew we were filming in LA. I kept thinking about the leather jacket and the Viper Club and I insisted on getting a shot at the Viper Room, just for me. There was deep, deep meaning to that. What I didn’t know is that the dice on the wall were on a two and five, double or nothing but the conspiracy theorists out there noticed it. The other conspiracy theory I heard was that the dog represented Roman Reigns, the hound of justice. The dog was just a good boy doing his job, but hey, art is subjective and it can mean whatever you want it to.”

Other topics discussed during the interview included his thoughts on his debut for All Elite Wrestling, his issues with Vince McMahon, and WWE’s problems under Vince McMahon’s leadership.