Karl Anderson recently joined the Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast to discuss his signing with the WWE, possible name changes, and having creative freedom within the company. Here are the highlights:
On working for the WWE:
“I’m loving, loving life right now, man. It has been a crazy whirlwind change in schedule and in life. It’s awesome, man.” Anderson added, “basically, myself, Gallows, and AJ, we wanted to come to WWE. 100 percent we wanted to, but we just figured the opportunity had passed us by. And we were happy doing what we did and we didn’t want to beg anybody for anything and we just thought, like, ‘man, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep New Japan [Pro-Wrestling] and indy stuff, keep making as much money as we possibly can, and if WWE comes calling, great. But maybe it won’t, maybe it will’. And then, all of a sudden, December 2015 or January 2016, life just flips completely.”
On making name changes once getting to WWE:
“I figured when we took the opportunity to go to WWE that maybe there would be a name change. And if there was, then we were fine with it because, like, it was a chance, we thought, to just get as global as possible. But I guess in our defense, or in the positive way we look at it was that we’d done so much cool stuff and so much big stuff with New Japan Pro-Wrestling and we had gotten our names out there, so much that the WWE decided that they didn’t have to change our names and they didn’t want to change our names. Maybe we had so many fans that recognized us as Karl Anderson, AJ Styles, and Luke Gallows that it’d be kind of silly to change our names. That’s how I kind of looked at it.”
On having creative freedom:
“Who would have thought I would have had the freedom? Before I signed with WWE, all I ever heard from negative people was, ‘you’re not going to have any freedom to do anything’. And if you watched us come out on RAW, you’d know that all that stuff is not true. We get to be us. We’re being ourselves.”
