Darby Allin On Wanting A ‘Crazy’ Build For His Match With Jeff Hardy

In an interview with The New York Post, Darby Allin spoke about his match with Jeff Hardy for tonight’s AEW Dynamite and how he hoped to have a bigger build for it. The two will meet in the Owen Hart Foundation men’s tournament. Here are highlights:

On looking up to Hardy when he was younger: “Yeah. From an artistic standpoint it’s been really cool because growing up and once I started getting older and in like junior high and high school, you can’t relate to a lot of people in wrestling, especially for someone like me. I was just skateboarding the whole time. I couldn’t relate to a big guy on steroids. It wasn’t gonna happen. But I could see a guy like Jeff that’s like a daredevil. It really drew me in because I was doing daredevil stunts on my skateboard. So I was like, man this is really interesting. I remember watching some of his stuff when I was like 6 years old and I would climb on top of this piano at my old house in Seattle and try to do a Swanton (Bomb) off of the piano onto the concrete floor. That was my first introduction to trying to emulate Jeff Hardy.”

On the build to the match and getting Jeff for a vignette: “It’d be nice. Like I said, this match kind of came very quick on me and I just thought originally it would have been crazy if we had a build to a singles match and like we had a promo battle were we could get crazier outside the ring leading up to the match. But here we are. We’re gonna get crazy this Wednesday.”

On his relationship with Sting: “When people first heard that me and Sting were going to be partnered up they automatically said, “hey, it’s the face paint. It’s the only thing they’ve got in common.” If they knew how we were behind the scenes and how we are right now they would understand this is more than just the face paint. We have such a connection. I remember back when we were (filming) at Daily’s Place for the year during the pandemic, I would be changing in the boiler room and Sting walked by and Sting has his own locker room, and Sting walked by and said, “What are you doing in here?” I said, “It’s a place I feel I can really be myself and cut loose and just think about what I want to do.” I don’t work well when I’m stuck in big groups of people. And then he’s like, “Dude come in my locker room. My locker room is your locker room from now on.” And I’m like, “Oh crap, really ok.” From there I’ve been changing in Sting’s locker room. It’s just me and him, painting up in his room and we talk for hours. There is so much stuff that goes into that partnership that people don’t get to see.”

On Cody Rhodes going to WWE: “I’m just happy if he’s happy. That’s all it comes down to. Different roads everyone can take in this journey in professional wrestling. I know I wouldn’t be happy doing anything outside of AEW because of all the free time and all the skating that I get to do and all my side projects and the craziness. I can’t be tied down to following a schedule that much. But if he finds that happiness that’s all that’s important. That’s all that that really matters to me. It’s nobody’s business but his own. He saw the passion that I had to be in AEW in the beginning and that’s why he chose me to wrestle him at Fyter Fest (in 2019). That was my debut. We went to a 20-minute broadway. To kind of take a relative unknown and work a wrestler like myself at the time and do that is very special.”