Former WWE Writer Kazeem Famuyide Discusses the Decision to Turn Lio Rush Heel, Discusses Who He Wrote for in WWE

– The Wrassle Rap podcast recently interviewed former WWE writer Kazeem Famuyide, who discussed writing for Lio Rush and Bobby Lashley and a lot more. Below are some highlights (transcript via Fightful).

Famuyide on who he worked with in WWE: “The first people I worked with just so people knew what I was doing — I was getting the gist of it, it was like, I’d work with Bobby Roode on certain stuff and Mojo and The Riott Squad and just little backstage bits, just so I was getting the hang of stuff. But, when I first actually started doing in-ring promos and live stuff, and getting on headset and calling sh*t from Gorilla, that’s when I started working with The New Day and Lio Rush and Bobby [Lashley] which was probably my favorite thing to work with. I loved working with New Day. That’s absolutely my… that was the most fun I’ve had working with those guys but you know, working with Lio and Bobby was a specific joy I had because they needed it the most. Lio was brand new, and he was young and he was somebody that trusted me a lot. I kinda got to give him the confidence to be like, ‘Hey, the sh*t that you do on social media, we can do that on TV. You can be yourself. You’re different and that’s a good thing.’ He didn’t really have to try and fit into the mold of what he saw work. He [could] kinda just be him, and to his credit, a lot of that social media sh*t, he did with no help. He did all that sh*t all on his own and it kinda helped Bobby get over as well, and I think when we first put Lio with him, the first two weeks it did really well. I thought Lio got Bobby really hot as a cool baby-face. I think Elias was over as fu*k as a heel. Kevin Owens, obviously, amazing heel as well, and we got people to actually root for Bobby because of Lio and my inspiration for him was like Floyd Mayweather and Jimmy Hart.”

Famuyide on Lio Rush talking for Lashley: “Like an urban Jimmy Hart. Lashley don’t gotta talk, I do the talking for him and he came in, he had the whole catchphrase for the first couple of weeks. The, ‘He looks like money, smells like money because he is money. He’s the heavyweight, he’s back to dominate’. Like it was a whole thing, and for the first couple of weeks, I started seeing crowds getting into it. Like when Lio would come out, they would start, ‘He’s the heavyweight, that’s back to dominate. He looks like money, he smells like money because he is money’ and that’s something he came up with minutes before we went on to RAW.”

Famuyide on the decision to turn Lio Rush heel: “Me, him [Lio] and my guy John Beckstrom who’s the lead writer of 205 Live who’s a great dude. We thought we were getting him over as a baby-face and then a couple of weeks later, kinda cooled, and you know Vince, he needs to be [in the mix] all the time. He sees something that’s working like, ‘God, nobody wants to cheer this guy. Fu*k him’. So that’s when we switched to the heel turn which I think also worked really well because it also so happened that K.O. had to go take some time off to recover from surgery so it was the perfect time to turn Bobby and have him be the reason why K.O. had to go away and do the whole knee deal, and that’s when Lio really started to get his legs under him as a talker, and that was really fun.” He shared.