When Pete Dunne was called up to the main roster, he was renamed to “Butch” by then-CEO Vince McMahon.
During a recent appearance on the “Out of Character with Ryan Satin” podcast, the Brawling Brutes member commented on when he knew he was going to be called up to the main roster, how he felt about his name change, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On getting called up to the main roster: “I knew that I was bound to be called up in the coming months, years or whatever it was going to be. But the destination had changed. Before that it was all about NXT, I loved NXT, what we were doing in the UK, and then moving over here. I was in no rush at all to get up to the main roster. And I’ve been lucky, because I’ve you know, been a part of the Royal Rumble, I’ve got to do so many different European tours and all that kind of stuff on the main roster. So I was relatively content, I loved NXT. But when the 2.0 stuff happened, I realized, ‘Right it’s on the horizon. I’m bound to get called up, that’s what I need to aim for.’
“So they started bringing me up for [WWE] Main Event matches, and dark matches and that kind of thing, I guess, to even get me in front of Vince or maybe just to test the waters with it. And then it kind of went quiet for a few weeks, and I finished up in NXT. And then after that — it was very casual, to be honest.”
On getting renamed: “I had flights come through for that Smackdown where I debuted, and then when I was just about to board the plane I got a call saying the new name, and you know, a basic rundown of the vision. And yeah, then I spent the next — well, the whole flight thinking to myself, ‘How is this going to be received?’ Knowing how it was going to be received, for the most part, and sort of weighing out my options of what I wanted to do with it.
“And luckily I had a great network around me in wrestling. I was able to call William Regal, Shawn Michaels, get their opinion on it. And sort of the overriding conclusion I came to was Pete Dunne, the name, that isn’t why people connect to me. People connect to me through what I do in the ring. And it’s taken a while to get there, but once I get that time in the ring to show people what I can do, I have and will continue to connect with the audience.”
On being anxious about the name: “To be honest, the main source of sort of anxiety or anxiousness with it was the way it was going to be received. I’ll back myself every time, to — like I say, if you give me that time in the ring, I’m going to connect to the crowd. I’m going to put on a show, right? I back myself to do that every time. But knowing how that was going to be received, that was a pretty anxious, tense time.
“But the second it was out there, and then you get that wave of people saying, ‘What’s this, this is not what we wanted.’ You know, your guard comes down, it’s not a reflection on you. If anything I took it as a huge positive because of the fact that people so upset by it at times, or concerned about it or worried about it, it shows how into what we’ve done in the past they were, and I’m grateful for every single one of them.”
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(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
