Kenny Omega Explains His Approach to Storytelling in Wrestling, How He Wanted to Innovate His Own Style

– Bleacher Report‘s Jonathan Snowden recently interviewed Kenny Omega ahead of tonight’s AEW Revolution event. Omega discussed his inspiration of his matches and wanting to develop and innovate his own in-ring style. Tonight, Omega and Adam Page are set to defend their AEW tag team titles against The Young Bucks. Below are some highlights.

Kenny Omega on trying to tell human stories: “A lot of wrestlers are wrestling fans at heart. I’m not necessarily a fan [of wrestling] anymore. I’m a fan of TV dramas. I’m a fan of video games, and I’m a fan of movies. I like the way that those forms of media are laid out to attract the fan. That’s my study material for how I put together a storyline or a match. Yes, I’m athletic and I can do cool moves and I try to be original with the way I perform them, but I feel the way that I put things together is different from the average wrestler because the average wrestler is just that: He’s just a wrestler. He’s a wrestler who wants to be a wrestler. I am wrestling as a job but trying to tell human stories to pull at your heartstrings.”

Omega on how he wants to be different with his matches: “A lot of wrestling historians and purists will go to bat and say that [Ric] Flair was the greatest of all time because he was so successful for a period of years. The same goes for [Kazuchika] Okada, who’s almost the modern-day Ric Flair. They have a very patterned main event style, but it’s very successful. They bring out the best in almost every opponent. I would watch some of the main event performances, and I would say, ‘Well, this is a great match. Wow.’ You don’t realize until after you’ve seen it 10 times or 12 times, this is actually just a formula they’ve kind of copy-and-pasted. … They see that the reaction is the same every time, so the wrestler says, ‘Oh, OK, this is a formula that works, and regardless of how many times they’ve seen it, it still works.’ I think that’s why the Kenny Omega boom started. There’s no Kenny Omega copy-and-paste formula. It’s all different. It’s difficult and very mentally draining, and because I do that, maybe it makes me not a true wrestler’s wrestler. What I am trying to do is not attract the wrestler’s wrestling fan; I’m trying to open up the world to what wrestling can be and show there is no limitation to what wrestling can be. I went way outside that box. I wasn’t using the age-old wrestler formula where if you do this, it’s gonna get a reaction, so you do this set list of things at this timing and know it’s definitely gonna work. I try to make everything unique, almost anti-wrestling in a way but still existing within the four sides of a wrestling ring.”

Omega on wanting innovate his own style: “I felt if I could innovate my own style, that maybe I could reach a new fanbase and even expand the pro wrestling horizon. I started small, and I started kind of testing the waters at DDT. We had crowds of 200 or 250. But by the time I had really taken off, DDT sold out Budokan [one of the biggest venues for wrestling in Tokyo]. I didn’t really know what I was doing aside from doing things I thought would be entertaining to my friends and family. But it was working. I had comrades and allies that shared the same goals as me. Ibushi and Michael Nakazawa, among others. There was a small group of us, and as I traveled the world, I would meet these people, and they would have the same ideas, the same visions, the same goals, just wanting something more. El Generico [WWE’s Sami Zayn], The Young Bucks and, eventually, Cody came around. Next thing you know, we had this alternative professional wrestling brand. None of our ideas were exactly alike but could exist in the same world together and provide this alternative.”