Austin Creed Reflects On New Day’s Heel Turn, Was Happy With How They Were Able To Do It

Austin Creed says that he and Kofi were very pleased with how the New Day’s heel turn initially started. The duo shockingly turned heel on Big E. on the December 2nd, 2024 episode of Raw. The two went off on E, blaming his injury for the group’s problems, and walked away from him.

The heel turn turned the two into among the most hated heels in WWE at the time. Creed spoke on The Ariel Helwani Show about the turn and said he was grateful for how WWE allowed them to carry it out. He noted that the show just “shifted” to focus away from tag teams shortly after that and they weren’t able to get a lot of chances to capitalize. You can see the highlights below:

On the Heel Turn Segment:

“It felt like we got a really cool opportunity to tell that story with E. Being able to be in that segment was incredible. And the thing that I really enjoyed about it is, they kind of just gave us time to do it. And they let us put it together and bring that to the screen, which I thought was received really well. One thing that really sticks out of my mind is after the segment. We’re walking to the back and there’s a girl and a guy, and they both got like, old New Day shirts on. And the girl has tears in her eyes. And she’s just looking at me, and I stop and we just stared at each other for like 10 seconds, and she just starts like quietly — just tears. And I’m like, ‘Oh, this is wrestling,’ you know? This type of a level of emotion. Um, so I thought that was awesome.”

On the Follow Up:

“Then we got to do some really cool stuff right after that. Being able to turn and changing the look and adding the little mohawk and the braids to the action. [laughs] And then I think that the show just shifted some, you know? A little bit less of tag team stuff on there, and so we don’t have a ton of big tag team stories on the show at that point. So we’re not as involved as we wanted to be.

“And so, we’re really excited to be able to turn, and to be able to do all this stuff and show a new leaf. And we always talk about it like onions. We’ve got to keep peeling back layers so you can learn new stuff about yourself and the character, and how they vibe with everybody there. But we just — we weren’t involved in a bunch of stuff at the time. So being able to focus on tag team wrestling now is an incredible feeling, because that’s where, like the heart and soul of this is, is tag team wrestling. And being able to put that on a pedestal and have everybody who watches wrestling be able to see that this art is so different from, whether it’s singles or trios or anything like that. They each have their own heartbeat, and the one that we have for tag team wrestling and being able to do that with everybody over at AEW is such an exciting thing to be able to come to realization.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit The Ariel Helwani Show with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.