One of WWE’s veterans & a student of the Hart Dungeon, Natalya, recently spoke with Edge & Christian on “E&C’s Podcast Of Awesomeness” and the two parties discussed various non-wrestling & wrestling topics. During their conversation, Natalya brought up how an unlikely “family friend” helped her score a job with the company she has now been with for 10 years.
Here are a few excerpts from that particular portion of the podcast:
“Tyson & I got hired by WWE and it took us five years to get hired. It was a really big production; for years and years I kept getting try-outs and sending in tapes and you know, when I look back at some of the tapes I was submitting they were terrible. I didn’t have an ounce of makeup on, I had my hair pulled back in a ponytail with a wife beater on and I thought those were great promo pics. I didn’t even think anything of it, I was very wholesome and like, I didn’t know, I was just Nattie. So, I had a really hard time getting hired and at the time things were different; it was more like the Attitude Era, I was sending in stuff and trying to get hired but I wasn’t really fitting into the mould of what they wanted and so I basically didn’t get out of their face, I stayed in there and John Laurinaitis was the one who hired me. I just kept on persisting and finally, finally, finally then I got hired.”
“I don’t know if you’ll include this or not, but I was lucky enough that there were people in the industry, at this time when I got hired; Bret still wasn’t talking to WWE, they weren’t on good terms, or they just weren’t talking at all and everybody knows [what they’ve] been through. Bret and WWE after the Montreal Screw-Job, so it was a tricky time for the Harts to get hired. So Chris Benoit, who was a good family friend and our family helped him break into the industry. So Chris Benoit is actually one of the people who helped me get hired and he really pulled for myself and Tyson and put pressure on Johnny [Laurinaitis] and said ‘I want to help these two people get hired.’ So I feel like it was really Chris that helped us get hired.”
