AEW: Kris Statlander Injury Update, Kip Sabian on Origin of Box Over Head Character, All Access Ratings

AEW

Apr 7, 2023

Kris Statlander ACL Injury Status Update

As noted before, Kris Statlander has been out of action for AEW since this past August due to a torn ACL injury.

Statlander recently provided an update on Instagram on the status of her injury and mental well-being.

“If younger me could see me now. My biggest regret is letting my self hatred for so many years stop me from making memories. I’ve got no pictures from years in my life where I was at my lowest. I didn’t want to remember those years, but it’s all a part of journey to get to where we need to be I guess. It feels so cheesy to say wrestling saved my life, but it gave me a purpose. It gave me something worth living for. Something I wanted to be better at, could get better at, and didn’t want to give up on, like I wanted to give up on myself so many times. But here I am, two blown out knees later and I wouldn’t change a thing. I may not be back yet, but I’m giving it my all and more to get there. Okay I’m never making a deep emotional post ever again after this.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kris Statlander (@callmekrisstat)

Kip Sabian on Origin of His Box Over Head Wearing Character in AEW

A recent episode of the AEW Unrestricted podcast had Kip Sabian as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Sabian’s thoughts on the origin and inspiration for his previous character in AEW that would wear a box over his head and and sit in the front row at AEW events.

“I’m a big fan of the acting ability of Shia LaBeouf. Now, there’s a stunt that Shia did where it was for the red carpet for, I think it was Nymphomaniac was the movie and he turned up on the red carpet with a bag on his head that said, ‘I’m not famous anymore’ and he just stood there silently and it was like life art and I remember at the time, I was like, this is great. I don’t understand it but I like it. So then I did more of a deep dive into Shia and what he was doing with this life art stuff and I was like, ‘Man, that’s pretty cool. Maybe I’ll do that.’ Fast forward, I’m planning this serial killer-esque character. I’m a big fan of Halloween as well. I like Michael Myers. These shots that they use in Halloween, I think it’s some of the greatest — in my mind, it’s the greatest horror movie of all time for simplicity reasons only that all of the fear that you have is from a background shot of a dude just standing there. They can’t see him but we can see him. I love stuff like that. I was like, ‘Man , what if I could do this?’
I’m like, ‘Man, what could I write on this box?’ So I’m like, ‘Okay, Shia had, I’m not famous anymore.’ So I was like, ‘Ah, I can put I’m not over anymore’ and then I had a self realization of, you know what? I wasn’t really that over anyway. So I don’t think writing that — I’m already working out the jokes that can come back at me from this so I’m like, okay, how do I really feel? And I was like, do you know what? I feel like I’m severely underrated in the world of wrestling on a grand scale and you know what? I’ve had enough. So, I literally wrote ‘underrated’ and then I was like, I’m over it and I wrote.”

Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com