During a recent interview with the New York Post, Aleister Black commented on working on the RAW brand, possibly working with his real-life wife (Zelina Vega), and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On enjoying having more of a slower build on RAW: “Yeah, I do. It sometimes goes hand in hand with a little bit of frustration because sometimes you want to go faster than what they’re allowing you to. But it has made sure that the audience has got really familiar with Aleister Black.”
On his finisher being well-protected: “For me it was important that with the character that I portray that I was effective, efficient because if I said all these things and every single time I’d have a match and all my offense would be countered or ducked or people would kick out of my moves left and right, then the character in contrast to my offense wouldn’t make sense. That’s why I wanted the Black Mass spinning heal kick to be, if I hit that in most given circumstances, like 95 percent of the time, that’s it, end of story. That’s how I wanted the audience to be conditioned as well.”
On being on RAW with Zelina Vega: “She’s super professional and I think we’d like to think we’re both really professionals. It’s just going to work and we play your characters on TV and however we are in private life is what we are in private life. Once we get to work, we got to work and it’s go time. For me, it doesn’t do anything specifically. I think the outside world is more fascinated by the fact that me and my wife are competing against each other than we are ourselves.”
On if he wants Vega to manage him: “I have no interest in having my wife as my manager and I don’t think she has to because it would be kind of cliché. It’s almost in the line of expectations where it’s like, oh of course you’re going to put them together, and I don’t want that. I don’t think that I necessarily need my wife or my wife needs me on screen because clearly my wife is doing a phenomenal job. She’s basically been the head of Raw for the last two, three weeks. I’d like to carve out my own path, which I’ve been doing very well for the last couple of weeks. Maybe in the future, you know, if they come up with something good and something we would both agree on, who knows. I’ll never say never, but as I’m looking at it right now, no.”
On the WWE layoffs: “Very sad. I was as in shock as everyone else. Obviously the entire world is going through similar things and unfortunately WWE didn’t come out unscathed. I just hope by the end of all this I get to see a lot of those faces, a lot of my friends back. I know the entire company hopes that. Everybody hopes everything goes back to normal sooner rather than later.”
On being an atheist: “My mom was Roman Catholic, my dad was part of … It would be hard to explain what my dad was a part of. It was a deeply rooted religion that was borderline … let’s say it was a very strict religion and it wasn’t the most caring and loving religion in the world. So I saw what that did to my dad and it kind of made me think and it kind of made me wonder because it was a big difference between my mom and my dad in that sense. That’s kind of why it gained my interest because on one hand I have this very open, welcoming religion in the Roman Catholics and on the other hand I have this like doomsday, end-of-the-world type religion which is very strict, very cut and dry, very bleak. I didn’t understand the difference between the two because I always thought they [religion] did the same thing. That sparked my interest, so I started reading and reading and reading and that’s how I kind of bounced through all these different religions that were there. I kind of drew the conclusion that for me, religion was just not for me. My conclusion was that for me it would come down to understanding that I’d feel more comfortable with the idea … not even comfortable with … but find more true in a scientific approach than there was in a theistic approach.”
