Austin Aries On the Challenges Of Being a Heel, Being Accused of Sexual Harassment For Christy Hemme Incident

Austin Aries recently weighed in on the challenges in portraying a heel, his moment with Christy Hemme in TNA that got him accused of sexual harassment by fans, and more. Aries was a guest on Sportskeeda Wrestlling’s Unskripted and you can see the highlights below (per Wrestling Inc):

On the difficulty of being a heel: “Things change, cultures change, the business has changed. When I broke in, I was trained by Eddie Sharkey which is as old school as it gets, you know? The mentality was, really for me, when I walked out of the door in the morning I had to assume the role, right? Even when the show was done if I was in the bar afterward or fans saw me at the gas station, I would give them a little bit of that heel character, I wanted them to believe.

“But in culture now, that doesn’t really work because unfortunately, that gets you labeled. People, for as much as they know that wrestling isn’t real, people started to think that Dan Solwold was this a**hole that Austin Aries was portraying every time they’d meet me. So, I think nowadays it is difficult. I think we’ve broken the fourth wall and we’ve peeled the curtain back and I don’t know that it does anybody any favors to kind of keep this persona to really make people believe because once people believe, it kind of colors your reputation a little bit.”

On trying to avoid “cancel culture” as a heel: “Also being careful not to step on certain lines, because we are really into feelings now and if you hurt someone’s feelings, we talk about the cancel culture, it’s a real thing. As a guy who is trying to offend people and get under your skin, it’s hard now to gauge where that is because if I really offend you, it’s a slippery slope and it’s delicate.”

On his incident with Christy Hemme: “I can give you an example and it was the Christy Hemme situation that happened at TNA. This was something that was an on-the-fly moment, she just made a mistake in the ring announcing, but as a heel and I’m offended and I’m upset that she announced us as the wrong names. So I’m in my head thinking, ‘let’s do something with this,’ so I backed her into the corner and made her say it right. Then I stood on the middle ropes and did my pose like I always did. But eventually, it turned into, ‘he sexually harassed her.’ People were legitimately upset online but my thought at the time was, ‘I’m a bad guy doing a bad guy thing, they shouldn’t like that, it wasn’t a good thing to do.’ But it wasn’t Dan doing it to Christy backstage and reprimanding her. It was a heel character doing a bad guy thing but again, people took offense to it online and started to make a lot of noise.

“It got re-characterized into something it wasn’t and that’s something that has kind of stuck with me all these years and people still make comments about it. It’s unfortunate because you’re doing something spur of the moment with improv, me and her have no issues, we had a good talk afterward, we’re professional, we are good as colleagues.”