wrestling / News
Wizard World Portland Q&A: Paige Wants to Face Brie at WM, Talks Dream Match With Her Mother
* After crashing the end of the New Day panel, Paige had her own Q&A panel at Wizard World Portland on Friday with Mo Lightning serving as the moderator. Paige started off talking about how she had a “disastrous travel day,” as her flight was supposed to get depart at 6 AM but was delayed until 8:30, after she’d already checked her bags. She had to get another buy her own ticket for another flight and her bags were still on the other plane, saying they’d arrive in Portland about fifteen minutes from now. She apologized for “smelling like swamp.”
* Paige then pointed out someone in the audience in a Bayley shirt, saying she appreciated it because she’s a big Bayley fan. The moderator asked if she thought it was unfair that Bayley didn’t get called up when Charlotte, Sasha Banks and Becky Lynch did and she said “Absolutely…I was furious actually. I was like, no, congratulations to them, you know. I’ve known Becky for like, ten years and Sasha and Charlotte since they started in [NXT], obviously. But um, I feel like Bayley is the most deserving so I was a little bit disappointed. I cried a little bit inside…and outside.”
* The moderator joked that this was Paige’s soft side when normally she’s such a badass, before teasing her about the fact that in the WWE 24 WrestleMania special, “all they showed you doing was crying.” Paige said it was her first WrestleMania, and it was a big deal to her.
* The questions went to the crowd then, with the first woman saying that she started watching wrestling because of her roommate and that Paige was good. Paige quipped, “I don’t even do anything anymore, I just do a lot of knees and kicks and scream a lot. No moves involved.” The woman asked how old she was when she started, and she said she was thirteen. She said she’s been wrestling since she was a fetus because her mother didn’t know she was pregnant with her, and Robbie Brookside (now a trainer in NXT) gorilla pressed her mom to the outside onto her dad. She said “That’s why I’m really weird. This is why I am the way I am and I’m not very bright.” She jokes that she always likes to leave an awkward silence in the crowd after every question.
* Next up was a guy who asked Paige who she wanted to face at WrestleMania. Paige said “I actually would love to face Brie, because you know, there’s rumors going around” about Brie’s retirement. She said she thinks Brie is incredible and that she’s on her last few matches, and she wants to be one of them. “So yeah, definitely Brie…and then maybe, I don’t know, like for the Divas Championship.”
* The next person asked what the most exciting and powerful thing about being a woman in wrestling was. Paige said it’s about being part of a male-dominated industry and being able to make it into WWE in the first place is an incredible honor and privilege. She said being one of the very few women in the company is amazing to her, and being able to use it as a platform for positivity. She said she gets a lot of people who tell her, “I’m okay with being myself because of you. You don’t care what people think, you don’t care what you look like.” She added, “Just being a woman in general in this company is amazing.”
* The moderator asked her if she gets to see any new movies. She said she wants to see Deadpool and Zoolander 2 and did her own version of the Blue Steel expression.
* The next person at the mic was a little girl who said Paige was her favorite wrestler because she was so pretty. Paige bantered back and forth with the girl a bit to the crowd’s appreciation. The moderator said you have to have a lot of appreciation for a little kid who can get up in front of a bunch of people to talk with someone like that, which led Paige to talk about how her mom putting a video up of her cousins who are wrestling, and her niece and nephew who are six and four were valets. She said, “I was just like, ‘I wouldn’t do it at that age!’ Thirteen, maybe…”
* The moderator asked about Paige getting into the business so young. Paige said she was a last-minute replacement when her father was short a girl one day and she knew some moves already, having grown up in the business so he put her in. “So I did, got knocked out, it was amazing,” she said. She continued on, saying that a couple of weeks later she got her nose broken and her dad made her wrestle the next day. She got hit by a car a couple of days later and wrestled the same day, quipping, “I love my family.” She followed that up with “I swear I don’t have dad issues, he’s awesome.”
* When asked who the easiest person for her to bounce ideas off of, she said that AJ was always amazing and she misses her. She said Nikki Bella is always very open to anything, as are Brie and Becky Lynch. She said she has a couple of writers who work with the Divas they pitch ideas to, “and sometimes they stick and sometimes they get ignored.”
* The moderator asked whose idea it was to lose to Summer Rae, which drew a reaction from the crowd. Paige said “Well, to be fair…everyone on the internet was like ‘When did you become a jobber?’ I was like ‘If you lose one match, you’re a jobber?'” She said the reaction is exactly what Summer and her wanted. She said Vince wanted her to help Summer out because she was going to start wrestling more, which Paige thinks is great because it’s more Divas to work with. She said as soon as people in the company asked who she was losing to and she said Summer Rae, everyone went “WHAT?” She said, “I was like, ‘Wow…that’s your colleague, and you’re like that?” She said it was great because it meant “the fans were going to lose their minds.” She said they loved the reaction from the crowd, but that on Main Event she went over Summer Rae which undid it all.
* After leaning forward too quickly and hitting the microphone with her mouth (which happened two more times throughout the Q&A), she said she wants to do more stuff with Summer and talked about her NXT work with her, saying that it was one of her career highlights in NXT.
* Next was a woman in a Roman Reigns shirt who asked Paige who her favorite rock band is. She said she has a lot; she loves the ’80s so she’s a big fan of Skid Row. She added, “Obviously, A Day to Remember” and said she doesn’t just love rock, she also loves stuff like Mumford & Sons has weird, eclectic tastes. After the woman said thank you, Paige said “You’re welcome…you should change that shirt, though” which led to a little funny back-and-forth and the moderator mentioning how Reigns and Paige are always the WWE people the Wizard World panels these days. She said, “I can’t wait for the Vegas one, that’s gonna be a good one. You adults know what I’m talking about.”
* The next person was a kid who asked what Paige’s dream WrestleMania match would be. Paige said it would be against her mother, saying, “I don’t know if anyone is familiar with my mum because she works the independent scene. She’s in like SHIMMER and she’s just a badass, she’s really freaking cool.” She said her mother is “like the hardest-hitting woman I’ve ever wrestled in a match…I come out with more bruises and broken bones than I ever have in my life.” The moderator asked if that was just her or because it Paige, knowing that she’s family so her mom can work more aggressively with her. Paige said, “Well it wasn’t me, I was like, ‘Mom, mom, no, ahh!’ But I broke her nose, so it was fine.” She talked about how she broke her wrist when her mother gave her a Samoan drop because she was new and didn’t know how to protect herself, and she blamed it on her mother and broke her nose because she was pissed. She noted, “She kicked my butt after that.”
* The moderator asked Paige if she works more aggressively against people she’s comfortable with. Paige said yes, then added, “or I wrestle more aggressively with people I hate, too. I’m not gonna mention any names, you probably know.” When Mo said he could probably name one, Paige said “Oh yeah, you think you know me?” and then went into a riff on Edge’s theme song, apologizing and saying “I’m so freaking weird.”
* The next guy said that Paige claims on TV to “own a lot of real estate” and asked, “Is this also your house?” Paige joked and said yeah, then talked about getting the catchphrase from her debut main roster angle with AJ when she came out and AJ slapped her, saying, “This is my house.” Then when AJ came back after a couple of months when Paige had been champion for a while, they reversed it because Paige was the heel and the catchphrase stuck.
* The moderator asked, “So is this gonna be your house when you start gaming against people?” Paige said she’d already done it and recounted how she lost to two small children ages six and eight, but beat a grown adult which evened it out. She said the kids destroyed her and noted that she didn’t have that stuff growing up, while kids today are playing with iPhones and iPads at that age. She said “Okay, now I sound like an old crazy lady, and I’m not old at all.”
* The moderator asked about Fastlane and whether she’d be in Cleveland for the show. She said yes, she’s flying out on Saturday with New Day and Roman Reigns — “your boy,” she said to the woman in the Reigns shirt. She said Reigns and New Day were going to Youngstown, Ohio for a house show, and she was going straight to Cleveland.
* The next person at the mic asked whether Paige has any interest in bringing the Women’s Title back as a separate title. Paige said that she doesn’t want to bring back the women’s title because she likes the word Diva, “as much as before I came here I was like ‘I wanna change that.'” She said it was “When you think about a WWE Diva, you think of us girls in WWE, not like the girls that are in the indies, the girls in TNA or in other different companies. So yeah, the word Diva means a lot to me.” She added, “Just redesign the Diva belt, because that butterfly sucks.”
* She then saw a couple people heading out to go to the bathroom and said “Oh, sure. This isn’t an Eva Marie match, all right?” After the crowd reacted to that, she said “I’m just kidding, I actually – I really like her. She works hard.”
* The next guy asked what it felt like after eleven years, being at the pinnacle of all her hard work. She said it’s incredible because she never thought she was actually going to make it. She said the first time she tried to get signed, “I tried to be what a Diva was supposed to be. I got a tan and I lightened my hair, I took my piercings out, I wore color…I brushed my hair, was the first thing and I never do that.” She said they told her she didn’t seem comfortable and didn’t fit right, so the next time she was completely dressed like herself and said “Well, if they don’t take me the way that I am then they don’t deserve me at all.” She said they liked it and trusted her enough to hold the championship twice.
* A fan asked her if she goes to concerts often and what was the best concert she’s ever been to. She said she does, mostly because of her friends and she’s not really into the music most of the time. She said the last one she went to was Sleeping with Sirens. The best one she’s been to in America was a festival.
* There were two questions left and she said, “Give me something juicy, let me gossip.” The second-to-last question was what superhero or supervillain she would be if she could. She said, “This is AJ’s side of things! I was the freak, she was the geek.” She said if she was asked about what superpower she could have, she’d choose invisibility. “Because I’m a creep.”
* The last guy went for something juicy and asked, “How’s your love life?” She said, “So that’s the question, ‘How’s your love life? How long has it been?'” The guy said he loved Total Divas. She said, “I’ll give you a little something: me and Kevin, not engaged anymore unfortunately.” That drew applause from one person, to which Paige said, “Thanks for clapping to my misfortune” and joked, “She’s just one of those slow clappers, and it’s not her time.” She said, “Yeah, that’s it. Paige is single, now moved into a house with two chicks and all of our cats and dogs. So yeah, that’s pretty much my life for the next eight years.” She said she was kidding and while she made herself sound depressed, she’s actually really happy.
* The guy asked for anything regarding Total Divas and she said, “Well, I can’t give that away!” She said she DVRs it and watches it, saying, “It gives me a nosebleed. Just kidding. I’m not kidding…no I’m kidding, please watch our show.” The moderator joked, “If there’s one thing to take away from this Q&A, it’s that we have nothing to take away from this Q&A…if you want to believe her, believe her. If you don’t want to believe her, don’t believe her.”
