Malakai Black Draws AEW Character From His Family’s Uncommon Religion

Malakai Black has unleashed an unstoppable force on All Elite Wrestling. As his popularity grows, so does the intrigue about the back story of his character. He was more than happy to go into detail about it in a recent interview.

Malakai Black, the star of AEW, met down with CBS Sports to discuss some of the influences on his current persona. Black, who recently joined Brody King in Dynamite’s The House of Black, claimed that some of his motivation stemmed from his family’s religious upbringing.

Parts of my family grew up with a type of religion that wasn’t common and it was a very ‘end of the world’ type religion. It was a very doomsday, ‘you’re on this Earth so you’re a sinner.’ It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re sent here on Earth and you will sweat and toil. There is no love. There is no affection. There was no nothing. There was just you and God working for your redemption. And, hopefully, by the end of that redemption, by the end of your life, you have redeemed yourself enough so that you’ve earned a spot in paradise.

That was something that had a great influence on me because my grandfather would tell me incredible stories about, and this might sound bizarre, but he would tell me stories about things that he witnessed with black magic in Malaysia. There was a type of voodoo that they used was that was called Guna-Guna. He got involved with that in terms of he saw it happening around the camps. Things were strung up and soldiers were sick and they couldn’t find what was going on, and the villagers were like, ‘oh, he’s being subjected to this voodoo.’

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That sparked my interest as well. As a kid growing up, I was exposed to a lot of maybe strange things, but it really shaped my mind into questioning everything and looking at the world differently than a lot of kids. It made for a very interesting childhood in a sense, you know what I mean? A lot of difficult moments and a lot of like, growing up very, very, very difficult, very disconnected often. It was definitely not your run-of-the-mill childhood when it comes to that stuff.

The ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were such a pivotal time for a lot of people where the world started changing and opening up minds. New ideas would come in. A lot of Black’s family was very conflicted in that ideology. It affected them in a negative way, in a way that they wanted to escape from it.

There you have it. As Malakai Black becomes stronger, the eye continues to become more disfigured. His run in WWE was the same character having a lengthy manic episode. The former Tommy End has put a lot of thought into his character, and it shows.

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