Willow Nightingale Reveals the Origin & Inspirations For Her Wrestling Character

Willow Nightingale recently looked back on the origins of her wrestling persona and some of her inspirations for the character. Nightingale recently spoke with Under the Ring and talked about how she developed her current character, and how Akira Hokuto in particular inspired her as a performer. You can see some highlights below, per Wrestling Inc:

On the origin of her character: “When I first started [wrestling], I wanted to have this brash, ‘I’m going to beat you up. I’m the toughest person’ [type of character], and it wasn’t believable because it’s not who I was. It was very inauthentic and then somebody gave me a piece advice. One of my trainers, Blake Morris, had told me, ‘People have fun watching you have fun.’ Of course, people can express that in a million different ways, but for me that meant like, what I do, how I have fun, find a way to put that forward. So all of my little quirks and idiosyncrasies and everything that made me comfortable being myself, I just kind of let lead the way. That’s really when I started seeing things click.”

On taking inspiration from Akira Hokuto: “She had inspired me big time in terms of like, okay, I can turn it around and I could still have the best of my career ahead of me. So I borrowed that from her. And for me, I look for tough hard-hitting people. I want my performances to, of course, be hard-hitting and tough, but [I want to] still find a way to throw my personality in there.”