Zelina Vega was crowned the queen of WWE after defeating Doudrop to win the Queen’s Crown tournament. The victory put her in the difficult position of having to stick to a royal gimmick. She went straight to the modern-day master for advice on how to assume her regal role.
Vega told Ryan Satin on the Out of Character podcast that playing a queen required some royal advice. She didn’t hesitate to get her favorite on the phone. Zelina called King Booker T for some tips on how to portray a royal figure.
“King Booker is my favorite king ever so I called him right around this happening and was like, ‘I need your help. I need your opinion. How can I even get a piece of where you took this?’ He was amazing and I’m very thankful for that conversation.
“I want not only for people to go, ‘Zelina was the first one,’ I also want to hear, ‘she was my favorite one.’ That’s one of the things Booker and I were talking about. If you’re looking at wrestling, you’re looking at the wrong thing. You need to watch movies and moments and real people because that’s where the real emotion comes from. I didn’t want to do anything similar to him because no one will be King Bookah and Queen Sharmell. They are untouchable. I remember talking to Vince about an accent and I don’t think he knew that I can kind of do an accent. I’ve been trying to make it sound worse and worse every time I do it. It’s an added layer, which makes it more fun.
People keep tagging me, ‘That’s now how we do the accent. That sounds Australian all of a sudden.’ Yeah, that’s the point. I want you to not like. I’m bad, you’re not supposed to like it. Silly things. I want to make people laugh. The backstage where the girls are yelling at each other and I’m sitting there, waving at no one, stupid things like that that people remember. I’m trying to take this to the point where people go, ‘she was the first, but she was my favorite.'”
Time (and her performance) will tell if the character will work for Queen Zelina. The results have been mixed for past winners of royal titles in WWE. For every Steve Austin, Triple H, and Edge, there’s a William Regal, Billy Gun, and a Mabel. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. We’ll see if Queen Zelina Vega can carry it as well as her mentor, Booker T, did.
What do you think of Zelina Vega’s run as queen so far? Let us know in the comments!