Malakai Black Explains How His Childhood Helped Create His AEW Gimmick

In an interview with CBS Sports, Malakai Black spoke about how he was inspired by his childhood to create the gimmick he is currently using in AEW. Here are highlights:

On have an occult character and where the inspiration came from: “I’m big into tattoo culture. I’m very much into the alternative music scene. It’s predominately black metal and hardcore. I have a fascination with the occult because I grew up in a certain household that had some very disturbing and interesting things. So I know how to live these cult-like characters because I grew up with it. I understand this. This is part of myself that I can put into these characters. Within a year, two years from that it started taking off. It has to contain an essence of yourself. I do think that when you grow up, you start to understand a lot more of yourself. Especially your past traumas. You start to acknowledge and you start to overcome. And when you overcome them, you can draw from them. You know they don’t fight against you. They work with you … The older you get, the more you understand yourself.”

On why he doesn’t talk about his past much: “Obviously, this is stuff that’s being asked more, but the problem is a lot of these people are still alive and, a lot of them, they changed their ways. So I don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I don’t want their hard work to be slapped in the face because I felt the need to talk about it on a platform. These people have worked really hard to not be in that position.”

On the influence of his childhood: “Parts of my family grew up with a type of religion that wasn’t common and it was a very ‘end of the world’ type religion. It was a very doomsday, you’re on this Earth so you’re a sinner. It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re sent here on Earth and you will sweat and toil. There is no love. There is no affection. There was no nothing. There was just you [and] God working for your redemption. And, hopefully, by the end of that redemption, by the end of your life, you have redeemed yourself enough so that you’ve earned a spot in paradise. The ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were such a pivotal time for a lot of people where the world started changing and opening up minds. New ideas would come in. A lot of my family was very conflicted in that ideology. It affected them in a negative way, in a way that they wanted to escape from it. So they did, but it did affect their personalities and it did affect their ways of perceiving the world because they didn’t get it because they were sheltered for so long… That religion, even back then, had cult-like tendencies. A lot of things that happened in that church were very questionable.”