Saraya Recalls Dusty Rhodes Advocating For Her After Being Told To Look More ‘Diva-ish’ In FCW

Saraya recently looked back at her time in WWE developmental and how Dusty Rhodes advocated for her to be able to be herself. The AEW star spoke with Knotfest’s She’s With the Band podcast and talked about coming up in FCW, and how Rhodes helped her push to stand out by being authentic to who she is.

“Once I got to FCW, the main trainer there tried to change the way I look too and I was so adamant about sticking to my guns when it comes to clothing and stuff,” Saraya said (per Fightful). “Dusty Rhodes, rest in peace, he was also an advocate for me for being like myself as well. So anytime Bill [DeMott] would tell me I need to be more divaish, I’m like, ‘Well, I didn’t get signed the first time for trying to be something different, I’m going to keep being myself.’ So I start screaming in my entrance, I start wearing more like — I start incorporating my leather and like my studs and stuff like that and it helped me because it made me stand out. If you put me in a line, I would stand out because I was so pale first of all, but I also was like a little emo kid compared to these beautiful, blonde hair, big manes of hair, perfectly tan skin, the makeup was perfect. I could barely brush my hair, still can’t, but that’s what made me so special back then and so relatable back then and that’s what made me like the girl next door rather than someone who was completely unattainable.”

She continued, “I feel like I represented a lot of girls that were, I call them freaks and geeks, the outcasts, misfits, all that kind of stuff. The people that think they could never do something like that because of the way the girls were represented back then. So, that was very much my core message and I’m so happy that I stuck to my guns with that because If I would have changed in any way, I wouldn’t have been nearly as successful. The thing that made me a success if the way I looked, that’s it. It has nothing to do with my wrestling. Wrestling helped, sure, being on the mic helped, but it’s the way I looked that was a bit catalyst in my success I think.”

Saraya is currently on a break from AEW TV, revealing in November that she was doing so in order to do more outside work.