Mike Rome Tells All About Transitioning To WWE From American Idol

Mike Rome enjoys his current role in WWE, but that wasn’t always his job. Prior to taking a job with WWE, he actually held down a job with American Idol, a gig that he hasn’t spoken about much since entering the WWE Universe.

This week on Out of Character with Ryan Satin, WWE host and ring announcer Mike Rome took center stage as he discussed various intriguing topics, including his journey to being signed by WWE, his experiences working alongside Samantha Irvin, his role in conducting backstage interviews, and much more.

“Greg Hamilton, who used to be ring announcer for Smackdown and NXT before that, him and I actually used to work at American Idol together. When American Idol was close to shutting down at the parks, I ended up moving Indiana Jones. He stayed there. When it closed completely, he ended up getting this audition for this wrestling thing he was talking about. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s wrestling’, and I was like, ‘Wrestling. What are you going to be hosting for wrestling? I don’t understand.’ He’s like, ‘Dude, I’m telling you. It’s so cool and it’s in Orlando’, and I’m like, ‘Wait, wrestling’s in Orlando?’ I knew it was back in the day. I was like, ‘I didn’t know it was still here.'”

“So he ends up going through this process. I’m still at Disney. He ends up getting hired working for something called NXT. At the time NXT wasn’t as popular as it is now and it was just kind of catching fire. So I started doing all this research, I started watching NXT, and I went backwards and started catching up on all the wrestling because I kind of dropped off around the CM Punk era, so I had to go back and kind of catch up and see what I missed just in case. He’s like, ‘You’d be perfect here.’ I was like, ‘Okay, cool. Let me go and do some due diligence.’ I would go back and forth, I’d come down, come to a taping and I would meet people. A month would go by and I come down to another taping and I meet some more people.”

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During the interview, Rome went on to share his experience auditioning for WWE and the anxious months he spent waiting for a response from the company.

“Then finally, after like six or seven months of that, I got an audition. I went in and I was like, alright, I’m ready. I’m doing this audition. They’re like, ‘We love you. It’s great. You’re in. It’s golden’, and then I didn’t hear anything. That was in, let me see. That had to have been in August because I think I was still in rehearsal for Halloween Horror Nights. It was probably August, so September, October, November, December, January, is when I heard again from them. It was like five months. So I was like, wow. Usually, you have an audition and you’re like, yeah, I nailed that. I was so confident when I walked out of there and it just punched me in the face. I was like, maybe I didn’t do as good as I thought I did.”

WWE is a fine home for Mike Rome, but he will never forget where he came from. It will be interesting to see where he goes next, but it doesn’t seem that he has any plan of leaving WWE any time soon.

American Idol is a good place to come from, but who would have expected Mike Rome to land in WWE from there? Sound off in the comments!