CJ Perry Recalls Pitch For Her WWE Character, How She Got On WWE’s Radar

CJ Perry recently looked back at the start of her time with WWE, recalling the pitch for the Lana character and more. Perry signed to WWE back in 2013 and debuted a few months later as Lana. She was quickly associated with Rusev and they arrived on the main roster in early 2014.

Perry talked about the early days of her time in WWE during her appearance on Insight With Chris Van Vliet. She talked about how WWE first noticed her and recalled her pitch for the character to Dusty Rhodes. You can see the highlights below:

On How She Got Noticed By WWE:

“So in college I was the most downloaded screen saver… Just me in bikinis on the beach, I know it’s crazy. I was shocked, too. And then I was on a big calendar, the cover of it and the big poster in there. And WWE saw that, and so they recruited me. They brought me down to Miami to a show. I was 22, I was amazed.”

On How Her Character Was Pitched:

“So Lana in NXT would come to promo class with Dusty Rhodes with at least five different characters and promos, not even kidding, with boards of storylines. I don’t know if you ever saw GLOW, when I watched it, I was like, I think she took my real life story, because that’s what I was doing. And Dusty loved it. Because, I don’t know about everyone else, everyone else was like, ‘You’re doing the most.’ But was just working hard and Dusty loved it. He’s like, ‘You’re going to have a very long career in this business.’ Because I was always like, ‘Oh, you don’t like this idea. What about these other five?’

“And so me and Rusev started working. One of the five ideas I was working on was me and Rusev, but we were doing more comedy, and he was the Bulgarian trying to un-brainwash me. I was the Russian that became Americanized, and he wanted to un-brainwash me, and it was very comedy and fun.”

On If They Were Dating At the Time:

“No, no, we were just friends. He would come over and we would shoot a bunch of promos, and I guess that’s how we became close. Then the next thing I know, Dusty said to me, ‘We only want you to do one promo. We want it to be serious and see what it looks like.’ I did it, and then the next thing you know, Miro was like, let’s do something serious. And then we were put together. We did one serious promo. He’s like, ‘Let’s not do comedy, let’s do serious.’

“And then next day, I was on NXT with him. I was just serious without an accent. And then Hunter pulled me aside. He’s like, ‘I want you to only talk Russian. Let’s start this and we’ll see how far [it goes.’ And then it was just an evolution. Triple H was very hands-on. He’s a genius. And he was like, ‘Okay, let’s try a different hair, a different suit or something.’ So that’s how the suit and the bun came about.”