Former WWE Superstar Mandy Rose recently guested on The Sessions with Renée Paquette podcast, where the one-time NXT Women’s Champion discussed the highs and lows of her WWE career, including winning the gold, how she found out she was being fired, and Roxanne Perez.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On how surprised she was by the turn of events: “Completely surprised with everything. I went to work, like a normal Tuesday for TVs. I was told that the title match that was supposed to happen down the line, at [NXT] Vengeance Day, it was said that we were actually gonna’ do the match tonight. It was around like 2 o’clock or something when I was told. Right away, I had a good inclination that something was up.”
On normally being kept in the loop on her booking: “Everyone treated me so great at NXT. I had a great relationship with Shawn Michaels, the writers, the producers, everyone. I was never kept out of the loop, being a champion for 413 days. I was in the loop with everything. I didn’t have many surprises like that. So it was very like… whoa, did I do something, what’s going on? Obviously I had some inclination because of what was going on on social media, and what was going on the night before.”
On who delivered the news of the title change: “It came from Shawn Michaels himself, so obviously, I knew it was coming from head of creative in that sense. I didn’t have to go and seek other answers, even though I wanted other answers. At that moment, I had to do my job and get planning our match and everything else that we had to do that night.”
On how rushed the title change was: “I felt bad for Roxanne because she’s so amazing, and I really do love her as a person. I feel like it was so exciting, anytime you’re told you’re going to win the title, but I felt bad because I felt like it was rushed, there was no promotion leading up to it, she had just won the match being the #1 contender. We were going to build on that eventually. It would be a really good feud. I felt bad because it was just thrown on her. I know that her family would come to shows; she could have had her family there. But she handled it like a great professional woman that she is. We just got it done, and she was very happy, and we had a great match.”
On anticipating something bad happening: “The next day, which I was anticipating with how everything went down. I was making jokes about it, actually, the night before. I was literally making jokes about it and the girls were like, oh my god, stop, you’re crazy. I’m like, no. It’s not crazy. I got a call, I don’t know, around 11 or something. You know that 203 [Connecticut] number… when it comes in, it’s gonna be either really good or really bad.”
Mandy on being at Indi Hartwell’s house when the call came: “I got that call, they said what they said. They had to release me because of the situation, but I didn’t really get much info, so that was kind of it. I was actually staying at Indi Hartwell’s house. She was upstairs getting ready for TV — I haven’t told anyone this story actually — she was upstairs getting ready because we had to do a double taping that day. I was like ‘Indi! I just got fired!’ She’s like, all the way upstairs: ‘What? Shut the f**k up! No way!’”
On her immediate reaction: “At first, you kind of like laugh a little bit. You don’t know whether you want to laugh or you want to cry. It was like I got punched, and I was like okay. I really need to think about this, handle this.”
