Wrestling 365 interview with Brodus Clay
Hosts: Alfonso Marimon and Jon Curry
Interview available at Spreaker.com/wrestling365
His Funkasaurus character:
“Initially, I had spent the last 7-8 months to the better part of a year training with the idea that I was going to be ‘the juggernaut’, destroy all that stuff and those vignettes were a lot of hard work and then seeing me in the back, cracking jokes and just being myself or whatever, the boss [Vince] said, are you sure this is the right way we want to go. He said what if we do this instead, and I was kind of surprised and kind of nervous and didn’t even know if I could pull that off as the dancing stuff really isn’t who I am at all, but cracking jokes with a smile, I do that all day and joke around with the boys all the time.
“I’m always running my mouth and stuff, talking trash, things like that, but I never really thought of myself as a dancer. First thing I done was ask to go see ‘The American Dream’ (Dusty Rhodes) and figure things out and so I went down to him and I just happened to bump into Naomi and I said to her, I need your help, because I knew her background with Orlando Magic and then we pitched the idea to have the two girls and we picked Cameron as a second and we came up with something and played with it. The cool thing about it was that nobody knew about it, everybody was expecting this one thing and with these days of the internet, no one knew.
“A lot of people were rolling their eyes saying that it’s not going to work, but I was given a challenge and I thought I done pretty well with the challenge put in front of me, it was completely out of the box than what I had originally prepared myself for, but it worked out okay and now that I look back at it, I’m proud of it. I can always be ruthless and aggressive in the ring, but I don’t think I’ll ever have the opportunity to be ‘The Funkasaurus’ again. I’m thankful for that time, because for me, it was a chance to be a character and have fun and honestly, the reactions that I got from the kids just made me want to do more and more of it. I enjoyed seeing the smiles and the dances and the videos they would send me on Twitter. That was really cool.”
His working relationship with Cameron and Naomi:
“Naomi and I, we trained together at Florida Championship Wrestling, so we were always cool and I’m really good friends with her husband. I went to her, because I always thought that she was so talented and being a Funkadactyl was almost a step back for her, but it was the way to go and she had helped me with the dancing and stuff, she always brings her A-game to work and she’s just really cool to be around. Cameron was, I know we had our ups and downs, but she was only new in the business.
“She had been signed around three months, so she kind of got thrown into the fire and when you get thrown in the fire, you make mistakes here and there, but overall, they’re both talented and good people and I enjoyed my time with them. They worked hard and I thought that was really apt of them. We all had our ups and downs, some of the things were blown out of proportions for TV ratings for the likes of Total Divas. The whole boyfriend thing, it was more like a joke to me. We never really had a big problem, if we had disagreements, we talked it out.”
