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Karrion Kross On Meeting Jesse Ventura, Scarlett Bordeaux, Final Testament, Triple H
Karrion Kross (@realKILLERkross) is a professional wrestler currently signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Ontario, CA to talking about meeting Jesse Ventura and doing his impression of him, his new character in WWE and where the inspiration came from, having Snoop Dogg call his matches at WrestleMania 40, the idea behind The Final Testament, rumored heat with Bobby Lashley, if he sees a return to NXT in the future and more!
Quote I'm thinking about: “You either quit or keep going. They both hurt. Choose wisely."
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"I was telling my brother, there's something about him for me personally that's refreshing, because he's like authentically unapologetic. Especially with media nowadays, being in front of a camera is sometimes for a lot of people like walking through a minefield. To just be honest and just to say what you're thinking and to say what you're feeling, you're not sure there's always this dark cloud or concern that it's going to bother someone. Jesse Ventura does not care at all."
"I was concerned he was gonna feel like it was patronizing. If I had a guy sit in front of me for two hours doing me, I'd be like do you want me to throw you down the stairs? Let's go. I lost the nerve to do it longer than I did in front of him. But then also, the little kid of me was alive and well being in front of him."
"Watching wrestling as a kid my friends and I would all sit down in front of the TV and we would just do impressions of everybody whenever they were on TV. It was just like a thing we put into practice just to pop each other in the room. And it was something we were always able to do. I've always notoriously been the guy with my close friends, if you happen to not pick up my call, you're getting an insane voicemail from somebody. It might be Macho Man, it might be Jesse Ventura. I don't know, it's not planned. It's just there."
"This rendition of the character that we're doing right now, for me personally, is the most repulsive to bring to life, because it's a bit of Sean O'Hare, who was one of my favorites. Also Kevin Sullivan as well, who doesn’t get the love and credit he deserves. A lot of what I'm doing with this character is like the opposite of a love letter. It's kind of a hate letter to all of the terrible things people just kind of say to each other, the way they behave. Being a deceptive person is probably the most rotten thing you could possibly be in life, and if you're looking to create a heel that can play off of anyone and do anything and functionally in a television format, someone who can reward the viewer for watching the show episodically and paying attention to the stories that they've told for 10, 20, 30 years, this is the perfect character as a heel. Because I can talk about Woods's past, I can talk about Kofi's past, and at the same time, I can also bring up vile things that maybe toxic fans have to say about, you know, this guy's better than the other. I was trying to do this with Dawkins and Montez, and it's a fine line to walk. But it was funny, there was one thing that a fan had said, I don't want to say who it was about, because I don't want to bring it back to life. But there was something online a fan said about someone I'd been working with while I've been doing this version of the character. I read it, I went, Oh, that's disgusting. I'm going to use that. I'm going to use that it's so vile and so untrue that of course when I say this, it'll actually put the fans on the side of the babyface, which is ultimately what I'm trying to do. I cannot win people overdoing this. This is the opposite. Then I said it, and I just out of curiosity, I couldn't help myself. I had to go online to see because they're one of the people that do the thing on Twitter every week. And then he went and said the total opposite. I was like, who's the psychopath here? This is this guy's tweet. He said this two weeks ago about him, and he's pretending he didn't say it. I was like wow, that's crazy. I should be this guy in wrestling. I should want to look like a lunatic. I should be this guy. But some things that I've said to the babyfaces while I've been doing this character, I've heard people in this business and other businesses kind of saying to each other, and I'm drawing from real places, and I'm just kind of reformatting it to make it become sort of a conversation piece, and it's an effort to add depth to the people that I'm working with, and for people to say, Oh, I know what he's trying to do. He's trying to conquer and divide. This is the dividing part. He wants to weaken them. But he does have a point, and there's a story to build from there, it creates an obstacle for the babyface to overcome in that story."
"Oh yeah, I'm not an ambush artist. I don't like people who do that. If I've ever had to deal with people like that, I usually throw them down the stairs. I find the nearest staircase, and somehow they wind up doing like a Logan Paul backflip down the stairs. I don't know how it happens. It just happens. But, yeah, I'm not one of those people at all. I will get with the people, and I'll say, hey, is there a period in your career that we can highlight, in this particular realm that we can bring to life? I think it's very carny, and it's sort of like, I don't know. If you're secure with what you're doing and you really believe that you're worth it, you won't try to ambush somebody you're working with."
"I don't necessarily know that I have one, but I will say that Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan, his character from The Walking Dead, when he was a villain with some really evil stuff, he had a particular way. He would kind of stare through people and smile at awful stuff. [Also], His name is at the tip of my tongue, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day Lewis. There was a minute where I was doing the mustache over the top lip, and a lot of people thought it was like an ode to Jake Roberts. But I think I've told you this before. I'll look up film study and workshops from actors that'll be online, and I'll always kind of study that stuff and convert it to wrestling. There's something about when you grow a mustache, or if you have any sort of beard that's an obstruction over your mouth, people read body language, and they read facial expressions. And when you conceal what your mouth is doing when you're talking, it makes people sort of uncomfortable. It's not a natural read when you're talking to them. So if you have that over the top lip and you smile, and it's a close smile, there's there's something off putting about it. So I literally did that on purpose, just to lean into the presentation of the character. My wife couldn't handle it anymore. I was like please just put up with it a little bit more. And she was just like, you look so awful. You look like an awful, evil, scumbag human being. I was like, Yeah, but it's the point. [She said] But there's another six days of the week to see this character walking around the house. And I was like, Okay, I can't handle that anymore either, so we got rid of it."
"Have patience. Bear with me. I'm trying. Again the minefield that is being in front of the camera and trying to be as open and honest as possible. I could say exactly how I feel about it, what I'd like to do. I'm sure people could imagine, and they could also imagine it will irk people at work for me to be like, Hey, I'm aware of what you want to see out of me, ultimately, truly what you want to see out of me. I'm always trying to find a way to make both parties happy. I'm the wrestler, not the writer or the director for a lack of better words, I know, believe me."
"So for quite some time, I had several people in creative tell me that there was an idea being entertained of me leading a group. They had a bunch of people that they were interested in putting together with us, and I had a certain set of people that I was interested in bringing in. Maybe at this time, I don't say who, but one day I will say who, because I don't want it to be taken the wrong way, people wind up getting disappointed and whatever. But someone had mentioned to me that AOP was on the roster with Paul Ellering, and I was like, wait what? Since when? Apparently they've been there for a while. They're looking for the right time to bring them into the fold. And they said, Okay, we can try that for sure. So we all meet at the Performance Center and we start shooting these cryptic vignettes, it was almost like Iron Man 3 with The Mandarin when he had all the TVs behind him, Ben Kingsley, and he's like, they’ll never see me coming, these propaganda videos. It was really cool. I loved the setup. And initially the direction we were going in was sort of like, almost like a militia occult group. I've always been one to try to stay away from reoccurring archetypes. There's nothing wrong with reoccurring archetypes in professional wrestling and films and movies and all that, they just they are what they are. There's reoccurring archetypes and the whole stories in the world relating to now. But I wanted to kind of present something new to people, something fun with some nostalgia callbacks, and, yeah, that's kind of how it started. We've gone in some different directions. At one point, they were like, we kind of want you to be like a mixed martial arts group. I was like, that's not a good idea. When you think about the times that we're being given to work, a mixed martial arts type of wrestler would be good in a 20 to 30 minute format, because now you have time to get into the holds and stuff. When you put people in holds and you're doing submissions and stuff, it's a lot of flat time. So if the show's moving quick and we want to keep the action going, what am I going to do? Put on a knee bar for three seconds? All of us can do all of that stuff, but we thought leaning more into the character direction rather than that would be a better thing to do. I wish we had 20 or 30 minutes. I would have walked down to Ken Shamrock’s music, give me the whole thing!"
"That was amazing. Hard to put into words. My biggest takeaway from that was walking onto the stage and just looking at a full house, the setup, I'm with my wife, everything her and I have been through, me growing up as a kid. I got Akam and Rezar next to me, I don't warm up to people very easily, but they're like family to me. Now we have the same sense of humor about stuff. Paul Ellering is next to me. I grew up watching Paul Ellering, I just couldn't believe it. I was like we finally made it. We finally did it. It was such an uphill battle, and I'm so glad it was because that made it even more like, wow, we really earned this. I remember looking at my wife and always going through the curtain, I'm in character mode. I hypnotize myself, almost like, dare I say, possess myself to become somebody else for that performance, to bring the Kross character to life. For that one moment, I was just like, Kevin is on the stage looking at his wife, Elizabeth. I looked her right in the eyes, and I just said, I love you, and I've never, ever done that, ever. For me, that was the moment I wanted to take that in as me. I wanted to just have that brief second, just for me and for her to remember, it was awesome, and that's such an understatement. I wish I could find better words. But especially after everything her and I together had been through too. I remember getting a call from one of my relatives after the show, and he's like, You know what happened to you when you got called up from NXT, and when you went to Raw and they gave you the weird outfit, and he got booked into oblivion, and then you got released, and then you got called back. Now you just did WrestleMania. He was like, you know how many people would have folded from that you should wear that period in time of your career as a badge of honor to virtually have been sabotaged and driven off. You knew what you were doing, and you just went back to the indies, you got over and you got called back, and then you did WrestleMania. That doesn't happen, that doesn't happen to people. I never looked at it that way. I don't even know if I went to bed that night. I was in such a good place after the show, and I had my mom and dad in the crowd. It was a really, really, really good day."
"I had a list of insane weapons that I wish got approved for that match. It was Philly, I was in love with ECW, Heyman got inducted into the Hall of Fame. I had all kinds of crazy stuff. One of the weapons on the list was Al Snow's head. I would have loved to have hit Snoop Dogg right in the head with head. That would have been my move. I would have done a flying tope out of the ring flying at Snoop Dogg over the table to hit him. That would have been great."
"I laughed at the whole thing. I there was something that the girls did that night. I think it was when Scarlet hit B-Fab with the garbage can. Such a natural reaction. You knew it was genuine. What do you do? You see that another girl hits another girl with a garbage can."
"I hate that I'm saying this. But zero [heat], it was a work. He knows I feel this way about him. It's not the first time I'm saying it. And unless you would have asked me about this, I would have never said it. I love that dude to death. After the match, I wanted to tell him afterwards so he didn't think I was trying to butter him up before we went out. I told him after the match was done, expressed how much I love him, how much I've looked up to him, what an honor it was to work with him. I remember when WWE brought ECW back. People can say whatever they want about it. I thought his section of being ECW Champion was awesome. I loved it. I was a bit of an ECW snob growing up. I was like, oh, ECW originals! I didn't care. He was like, no, he's awesome. He looks like the f*cking Hulk, and he's diving out of the ring and doing crazy stuff. He's putting people through tables and stuff. And then, for me personally, fast forward now I'm working Mania with him. I told him all that at the end of the match. On the way to that Mania match, Bobby and I were constantly trying to find ways to intensify the conflict. Respectfully, we just felt like there were certain things on the way there that felt redundant. And it's not me being salty about anything, it's just him and I wanted to make this as intense and as crazy as possible. He had an idea to try to blur the lines on the way there, to make it feel as real as possible. There was even one time Bob was like, 'You know what we should do? All these guys, they like to talk and they like to run to the dirt sheets and stuff. Dude, we should fight at the beginning of the show. We should get in a fight because all these guys are going to go and call the dirt sheets and tell them that we actually had a fight, and it's going to stir people up into what we're doing on TV.' I was like, 'Bob, what? Hold on a sec. First of all, what happens if nobody breaks up the fight?' And he was like, damn, I didn't think about that. I go, Yeah. And also, what happens if we get fired? Because what are we going to do? Hunter's going to pull us aside and be like, what's wrong with you guys? [We say] Oh, it's just a work. And he's like, You guys are bleeding, what are you doing? Then just the whole logical process of having to explain that it was a work and hoping that the office would have been okay with it, that we did that, and then it spilling. I was like let's hold off on this idea. I said, I love crazy stuff like this, but please, let's hold off on that idea."
"Him and I were every single week trying to make this as insane as humanly possible. I'm glad I didn't in retrospect [but] he wanted me to Power Bomb him out of the ring and through a table at Mania. He wanted me to give him a running Power Bomb out of the ring through [a table] he was ready to put his neck and everything on the line. I was like, ready to do thumbtacks. I said, if they let me set a table on fire, like we're ready to do barbed wire, we're ready to do all kinds of crazy stuff. And maybe it is a good idea that we didn't do it. I don't want to promote that it’s the best thing to give to people. There's a lot of things that could go wrong. You get a barbed wire in your eye. What if you get a barbed wire in your balls? Think about that or a thumbtack in the nut. So I don't know. But yeah there was zero issues."
"Sometimes I do, but the truth of the matter with that is, in my opinion, NXT is a program where they're attempting to build new stars. They want to create stars for the future. Somebody could encourage me to selfishly say yes and try to pander to an audience listening and make them feel like that's something that they want. I know what it's like being someone coming up trying to get at something you're after. And it sucks when somebody comes in who's already had their shot, who's already been there, who was already basically given everything you could possibly want, undefeated with a championship, and you got the whole thing, it's like they're coming back in here. Now that spot is unavailable for someone who really needs it to move into. I'm so grateful and so proud of my work at NXT, but for the sake of everybody else down there I don't think I should be down there doing it. If I were to come back for a match that people would want to see like a one off, some sort of program that would be fun to watch, that's different. But to go back down there and chainsaw through everybody like, that's not going to help them. It would help me and people would love it. I'd make sure they love it. There'd be a body count. There'd be bodies everywhere. There'd be people flying down the stairs. But for the functionality of the program, there's new people coming up, and the business needs those people. They're learning and they've got all the best minds down there."
"That I get to travel the world with my wife, that a relative of mine is doing well and to be here talking to you."
