Jon Moxley On WWE’s Restrictive Promos Written By ‘A Madman’

Jon Moxley is no longer in WWE, and he is very happy about that. He can grab a microphone in AEW and speak his mind without having everything scripted out for him.

Moxley spoke about WWE creative at length following his WWE release. The term “that’s good sh*t, pal,” was coined thanks to his exposing interview with Chris Jericho. He has more to say as he can now look back at his WWE career much further down the line.

Moxley spoke to Busted Open Radio about having his words written out by a 74 year old man. He had fear that those promos would make him look foolish as well.

“It’s really simple. It’s a lot of things but the simplest thing is they don’t give me a script. If I had to boil it down to one thing that drove me crazier than anything was the fact that I got handed a script and told what to say. The first time that ever happened we were in the Shield and they handed us a script. Even in developmental, we are down there with Dusty. That was one of the best times I had in the business in FCW cutting promos. I heard the term scripted promos. That blew my mind. The first time they handed me a script, it was like Roman says this, Seth says this, Dean says this. I thought it was a suggestion and they were filling in words on the run sheet.”

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“I was like ok to the writer, I got some cool ideas. We can say this or that and they were like, no, this is the way you’re going to say it. I was like, yea, but this is my idea and it was made very clear to us that this is what you are going to say. I remember having this feeling in the pit of my stomach, like, oh my God, I made a terrible mistake…I’ll tell you what pressure is.”

“Pressure is having a two-page script written by a 74-year-old madman that makes no sense to you that’s going to make you look stupid and your on worldwide TV live and you have to memorize every single line and somehow try to pull it off and not look like a total jackass. That’s pressure. A lot of times I did pull that off. A lot of times I didn’t. But, I’ll never have to be in that situation again. Now I just get to be me and it’s a nice feeling.”

There is a lot of pressure when someone hands you a promo and expects you to recite it minutes later. Thankfully, Moxley is past that point in his career. Others are not in the same situation as they are still made to deliver lines as they are written.

Dusty Rhodes prepared Moxley for a lot of things, but he never made him recite anything verbatim. Thankfully, The American Dream’s son will never ask him to do it either.

Thanks to Wrestling News for the quote