Tony Khan On Trying to ‘Camouflage’ Orange Cassidy’s Skill Until the Right Moment, Cassidy’s Recent Push

Tony Khan discussed the rise of Orange Cassidy in AEW and how he took a slow, careful approach to Cassidy in a new interview with the New York Post. The highlights are below:

On coming upon his tactic to bring Cassidy up the card: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, like that’s it.’ He can do all these things and sometimes he doesn’t bring them out until later in a match. What we need to do is hide those things as long as possible. People don’t realize he can do those things and so the long-term idea was he would be like a manager, a character, a variety character on the show and then when the time was right, we’d put him in a big program, a pay-per-view. He would have his first match as a singles star and that would be the beginning of the story and the breakout.”

On not being as familiar with Cassidy at first: “In terms of book smarts and intelligence, he’d be one of the top-five people in the company and his presentation is genius. Once I started to talk to him and get to know him, I didn’t know that the person under that gimmick is actually incredibly intelligent, very knowledgeable, very capable … The more I talked to him, the more I liked him and realized he does know what he’s doing. There was a way he could be a very important person for you.”

On trying to ‘camouflage’ Cassidy’s skill: “There was a six-man tag where he (Cassidy) did a couple of things and when he got through the curtain I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ He’s like, ‘I did a stunner.’ You did the Stun Dog and I’m like ‘Save all that stuff man’…Once I figured out how capable he was, really tried to put something together for him that would allow him to camouflage his skill until the PAC match and then the PAC match was when we started to unleash all this stuff we had been holding back.”