Karrion Kross On Adapting to WWE’s Character Process, Getting Feedback From Triple H

Karrion Kross recently discussed his in-ring style as opposed to his character and adapting to WWE’s style of characterization. Kross touched on the topic during his appearance on Bobby Fish’s Undisputed Podcast, and you can see some highlights below (h/t to Fightful):

On his in-ring style: “From a performance standpoint, in-ring, what I always really liked a lot, growing up in a family of amateur wrestlers and boxing, was pro wrestling that kind of married the theatrics with stuff that really looks like legitimate combat sports. I was always involved in the practices and stuff like that, and when I got to see all of my superheroes in WWF/WWE on TV doing stuff like that, and then later on in my life ECW and All Japan etc, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so cool.’ Because I knew some of this stuff wouldn’t work, and then you see the things that do work, and that always looked more devastating to me. So when I began training as a wrestler, I wanted to utilize some of that stuff because it spoke to me and I knew it would speak to other athletes and people with a legitimate background. That was just the way I wanted to perform.”

On his character on the indie scene: “On the independents, I really kind of did this character in its most consistent rendition, sort of as a hitman-slash-serial killer, I was kind of somebody’s heater, whether it was for the promoter, the evil promoter, or if it was coming in and targeting people because the reality of it is, independent wrestling is independent wrestling. It has a very short budget, it doesn’t have any sort of commercialized backing behind it, so I don’t rely on any sort of presentation whatsoever. All I needed was a little bit of live mic time. I was gonna produce my own promos to sell tickets, and when I got in the ring, I knew the audience and the demographic that I would perform for, they liked the same type of wrestling that I did.”

On adapting to WWE’s presentation: “When I went to WWE, I knew, with it being a story-based company, that coming in as a shoot fighter, wrestler type thing was not going to cut it. So I really began to lean in and embrace their process of creating a larger-than-life character type character/presentation. I had several conversations with Hunter about it to just explore what we could do with that.”

On getting feedback from Triple H: “I wanted most importantly his feedback on my ideas because they’re the billionaires, I’m the guy wrestling on the indies. I said, ‘Hey, here are my concepts. If we put this on a world stage, what do you think about it?’ I just kind of kept my in-ring style, hoping to be able to appease both types of fans, fans that are looking for that, and then fans that are looking for the classic larger-than-life type of character. That was the whole reason behind it.”