Malakai Black Expected the Fan Reaction To His Feud With Cody Rhodes

Malakai Black says that he wasn’t surprised by how the fans reacted to him during his feud with Cody Rhodes, and he explained why in a new interview. Black was a guest on the latest Rasslin with Brandon F. Walker and talked about his feud with Rhodes; you can check out the highlights below (per Wrestling Inc):

On if he was surprised by the reaction: “No cause it was exactly what I thought it was going to be. That was all, in my head, structured that way. I understood where I came from and I understood how the audience viewed me. And he (Cody) did too. I think, for the most part, we played to our advantage with it, with certain things. Sometimes you have to change your tactic, but for the most part, it played out exactly like I wanted it to play out.”

On why he initially received a positive reaction: “I think when I first came through the curtain out of the darkness basically, I think everybody wanted to see me succeed. And that’s why it was so hard for the audience to dislike me because they all knew where I came from. It’s a very smart audience. That AEW crowd is an incredibly smart crowd in terms of what’s going on in the landscape of pro wrestling. So everybody was rooting for me because of the way everything else went.

“So it was very difficult for them to dislike me, so then it became a thing for me to just go with it, embrace it and call them the House of Black. Because now I felt ‘well, I’ll make you a part of it and I’ll make you feel like a part of it.’ I think was doing a good scaling of having a 50/50 balance between the dislike and the like. I’ve always been, this is why I was dubbed the anti-hero at one point, I’ve always thread that middle line of being a tweener. I can fill in any position I need to.”