Kofi Kingston on Putting Together a Ladder Match for WrestleMania 36 With No Crowd, New Day Looking for the Next Gimmick After Pancakes

– WWE Superstar Kofi Kingston appeared on an ESPN roundtable stream yesterday ahead of the airing of his match on WrestleMania 36 Part 1. The roundtable featured Peter Rosenberg, Arda Ocal, and Ariel Helwani talking with Kofi Kingston about the evolution of The New Day, how the group is thinking of the next gimmick to replace the pancake one, and more. You can check out that video and some highlights below:

Kingston on how things are going for him right now: “Yeah, everything is great man. Everybody is healthy. Everybody is safe. We’ve been kind of hold up like everybody else, kind of keeping things pretty close. We might take walks through the kids because my kids will not stay inside. It’s not healthy for anybody to have like the Tazmanian Devil. The house would be completely ruined. Every now and then, we’ll go out in nature and just walk through the forest because my wife is a big hippie, and that’s what she likes to do. So, it’s been nice, man. I feel like my glass half full situation is that even though we’re in this weird, uncertain, abnormal time, for me, it’s kind of like, I’ve spent so much time with my family, I almost feel this sense of normalcy, where I don’t normally get to be home with my family. I feel like I get to be a regular parent who spends a lot of time with their children.”

Kofi Kingston on the New Day still being so popular all these years later: “Yeah man. I don’t want to toot my own horn so I’m glad you did it for me, but we talk about that all the time. We’re always looking for what’s next. We went from Booty-O’s cereal. Then, we moved onto ice cream. We had our unicorn horns at one point. Then we moved onto pancakes, and we’ve been talking about moving on to something else for like the past year-and-a-half to two years, but every time we go to the arena, and everybody has all these target signs, ‘Hey, this is the pancake target sign! Hit me,’ and you see them throughout the arena and there are ‘We want pancake’ chants going on, now it’s like, ‘Man. They’re still cheering for it. Well, let’s give them what they want.’ So, I think we’re in a very unique situation and we’re all grateful for being in a situation where we are still able to reinvent ourselves. I think we take a lot of pride in having our finger on the pulse of pop-culture. So, we kind of incorporate that every single time that we go out there, and we’re blessed with some TV time. So yeah, it’s crazy, and it’s been so long. We were looking at some stuff we used to do online with the WWE app online. There were so many little skits. We were just trying to find our footing and going through a bunch of those — thinking about stuff to talk about for our podcast. The New Day: Feel the Power plug, which you can check out in these dire times if you like smiling and laughing. We put smiles on people’s faces and laughs in their bellies.”

On needing adrenaline for his WrestleMania 36 ladder match and not having a crowd for the match: “It is very different. It’s very different. I don’t think the putting together the match is all that different because we know that there’s going to be somebody watching it somewhere. And we want to put on the best match possible. And in terms of advancing our storylines and everything like that, we’re also thinking about that when we put the match together. As far as the actual like physical participation in the match, it is very different going out there with no crowds, especially with like us, we feed off the crowds. New Day is all about crowd participation. But for us, we — a lot of times, we’re just trying to entertain ourselves, so not that we don’t need the crowd, but we’re able to kind of settle in. Like the match that we had with The Usos with Miz and Morrison on commentary on Smackdown last week was a good example of that where it was very strange at first. But then after a while, we’re talking trash back and forth with The Usos, and like we have such good chemistry with them, that you can’t help but get into the match. We are so passionate in what it is that we do. It’s different for sure. Definitely different, but the energy level is still there.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit ESPN, with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.