Santino Marella’s daughter, Arianna Grace, participated in several beauty pageant contests and wrestled for independent promotions before signing with WWE NXT in April 2022.
Speaking with Chris Van Vliet for a new interview, Marella noted that his daughter Grace had all the qualities to be a WWE Superstar from the time she was eight years old. He said,
“Yeah, so she was identified young. When she was a child, everyone would come up to me and tell me that [she was] gonna be something or that she’s a superstar or that she can do anything. She was just articulate and her personality was incredible right… so now all of the sudden, I have all this pressure like I have to be able to nourish this. I have to be able to get her where she needs to go, she has all of this potential and this talent. If she doesn’t become a superstar, it’s because I dropped the ball.”
“So we had some very serious conversations when she was eight years old and I’m like ‘You were born to be a superstar. I don’t know how to take you to Hollywood, I don’t know how to get you there but what I can do is I’m pretty good at this wrestling thing. WWE, they make movies. WWE Studios. I’m gonna go become a professional wrestler and then we’ll make those connections and I’ll pull you in.’ That was the plan, the 18 year plan we called it. I had to go, I left to go to Japan for a year and I went to Kentucky for a couple years and it was hard for us, very hard. But, it paid off when she got signed, not when I got signed.”
Grace was written off following an injury in October of last year. Her push was derailed following a torn ACL for which she had to undergo surgery. Marella, meanwhile, has been acting as the Director Of Authority for Impact Wrestling.
