Kenny Omega Discusses How My Hero Academia Inspired His Match at AEW All In: London, Passing the Torch to Will Ospreay

AEW star and former AEW World Champion Kenny Omega recently joined Crunchyroll’s The Anime Effect to discuss his epic title match against Will Ospreay at AEW All In: London, and why he took inspiration from All Might from My Hero Academia for the entrance and the theme of the match. Below are some highlights:

Kenny Omega on Where He Fights Inspiration for His Matches & Performances

“It’s not a secret that I’m really sharing with the world right now, but I always use the media around me as a way to inspire future performances. Sometimes I dig back in the vault, and I’ll find something for a unique inspiration for a match, something that happened in the eighties or the seventies. It happens. But um when I had thought about sort of Kenny Omega as a as a whole, as an entity. And what he’s been like since he’s come back. You know, there have been so many ups and downs.

“There have been moments when I felt great in the ring, but then there’s been moments where I felt terrible, but I had to show the smile still. I had to keep that mask on a little bit because I don’t want people to always have to worry about what’s going on in the guts, you know? That’s the last thing I want. I don’t want just forever sympathy because Kenny Omega sometimes has bad days. I want people to sort of judge my performances based on the performance itself. Without that being an excuse. I don’t want that ever to be like a built-in excuse for my matches.”

On His All Might & My Hero Academia Entrance at All In: London

“So I always felt, especially while watching, like, yeah, All Might incurred that terrible stomach injury when he fought All For One. And since then, his power’s been diminishing and diminishing. And because he can’t absorb the nutrients and get and receive or he can’t absorb the nutrients and preserve his energy, the amount of time he gets to use his powers becomes, you know, smaller and smaller and smaller. And it would really hit home to think back about that and relate it to, you know, my stomach issue as well, which is, you know, I have scars that are pretty much in the exact same spot. And it really reminded me of — And I thought, man, if there is ever like a large-scale battle- and I thought this since I had finished watching the final season of My Hero Academia, I said, I really think that I’d like to do Armored All Might as sort of like an inspiration for an entrance and for even the theme of the entire match. And I didn’t think it was possible. I just toss these ideas out in the air, and sometimes they fly, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they nose-dive right away.

“But you know, the folks at Crunchyroll, yeah, they were very, very nice in helping us out in a timely, speedy manner because like I said, I just didn’t think it was possible. And when we finally just said, Okay, you know what? What harm is there in asking? So when it came down to, okay, have this crazy event. We’re looking to get forty to fifty thousand people back in Wembley. And here I am holding the championship belts. It was a very big possibility that I’m gonna be main eventing this thing. And I’d always wanted to give sort of my New Japan Tokyo Dome presence. I wanted to be able to have more of that sort of representation headed to the ring in a big way, like I would for a Dome match, um, but in the same way at the Web at Webwood Stadium. And I’m glad we were able to do it. And I’m glad that Will [Ospreay] actually had something that he cooked up as well, because it really helped tell the complete story and add a lot more just meat to the bone, I would say.”

On Telling Will Ospreay ‘The Rest Is Up To You’ After the Match

“So I do feel that there’s certain phrases and meanings to words that you can say, even if it’s pulled directly from a movie, from an anime, it has meaning and has profound meaning. And when I told Will, like, ‘Hey, it’s all up to you now,’ there was more to that. We had a bit of a conversation, and I actually said to him, You know, it’s up to you now. And I added the part of, you know, I don’t know if I can do it anymore. And it’s not that I can’t do it. It’s, can I just not do it at the volume that the fans expect me to do it? Like All Might, you know, like for if we’re gonna tie it back to that, the amount of times he can use his powers becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. And I always feel the expectation of the people, and they deserve to have the best show in town. They really do.

“If we have a champion, you know, that can beat me, if we have someone that the fans have adulation for, have it admiration for, cheer for him or her, you know, that’s something special. And that’s something that needs to be protected, I believe. Um, because it’s so hard to find, you know, new stars. And when you do, you have to make sure that you’re gonna give them an environment where they can thrive. And so my goal, you know, knowing how hungry Ospreay was after coming back from a very scary surgery. You can tell a hungry is he he has his house still in the UK, but he still wants to be on every single show. And even if he had a match the next day, the biggest match of his career at Wembley, he was still grinding it out on a local indie the day before.

“I can’t do that schedule anymore. I just can’t do it, and I do feel that if there’s a champion and someone who can beat me in the ring, if there’s someone like that out there, and I sort of had made my sort of mental choice that it’s gonna be Will Ospreay, if I want to make sure that they can not only have the greatest of performances, but they can capture the fans’ imaginations and they can have them cheer for them more more so. By this, just the sheer heart that you possess in your performances, but also just for the volume of workload.

“You know, I want as many cities and as many countries to see Will Osprey as champion as possible. In that moment, absolutely, that was the best choice that I could make was having Will be the next guy. I don’t know if you want to call it a passing of the torch, but certainly I don’t feel like I’m disappointed for losing the belt. I feel the opposite. I feel like I lost to someone who is just, at this point in his career, hungrier than me, and someone who can take up the schedule that the fans deserve for their main event champion to have.”

On the Important Aspects of Being a Main Event Player

“There are a lot of aspects to being a main event player, to being a champion, to being someone that the fans can depend on. And one of the skills that hasn’t really ever been honed and un unless we’re talking about a very small, tolerant group of individuals, but the skill of being able to perform in a stadium is very different than performing in an arena. It’s very different than performing in a community center. It’s very different than performing, you know, outdoors at a softball tournament. You have to do different things when you’re in a stadium. You have to make sure that the people in the upper bowl sections can actually see and understand what’s going on.

“Things, motions have to be bigger. They don’t have to be faster, but they have to be bigger, and they have to reach out to everyone in that seat. Because at the end of the day, if you can get everyone to get off their seats and give you their energy, then you’re ahead of the game more than anybody else in that card because you achieved something great that no one else could on that night. And on of course in a perfect day, I would love for everyone to be able to do it and be able to say, like, hey, I got the crowd engaged, and they were just loving it from start to finish. But the truth is, you know, it you you need you need the amount of reps to do it accurately. And it’s very difficult to say, okay, we’ll just run more stadiums and get practice that way. It doesn’t work that way.

“It just takes you on those opportunities when you can work in a stadium; you just have to make the most of it. And I, of course, luckily I’ve had a lot of Tokyo Dome experience, you know, Budokan as well. Even I would say, like Osaka-Jo Hall, like at the castle, it’s a pretty big venue as well. So you get that feeling of largeness, of where if you make a maneuver, if you do something that has a sound, you know, it sort of goes up in the air and dissipates. It’s very different than when things are more intimate and congested.

“So I feel that, you know, the symbolism there between me not being just normal All Might, but being armored All Might is like, ‘Yeah, I’m broken, and I’m busted up, but there’s still one more thing I have to teach you.’ And to me, that was the magic of a stadium mesh and how to do it efficiently, effectively, and to make people care, whether it’s the front row, whether it’s the guys who are at the very top. And I do feel that as a final test, you know, Will nailed it. He did incredibly.”

Kenny Omega has been off AEW TV since losing the title to Will Ospreay at AEW All In: London last month. His longtime friend and AEW co-founder, Matt Jackson, recently said that Omega will be back and “better than ever” eventually. There’s no word yet on when Omega will be making his AEW TV return.

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