AEW Personality Recalls “Frustrating” WWE System
RJ City spends most of his time these days either making coffee in his underwear or confusing the great and good of AEW on Hey! (EW) and now the star has detailed how he got started in the company and reflects on his time in WWE.
The Canadian star had featured on WWE programming as The Bump for around eighteen months before he called time on working for the company as they continued a series of releases.
Speaking on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, RJ City discussed how he felt about working in the WWE system and how he was left feeling disenchanted by the end of it:
“Well, I had been working at WWE for like a year and a half doing a variety of things, but the system was such that 80% of the stuff we would attempt to do would never happen. It was very frustrating. I’m happy with what I did, but there was always more I wanted to do. Then, to put it politely, a big tide came in and wiped everything away and I got really disenchanted and I was like ‘You know what? I did this, that was WWE stuff and let’s just move on.’”
With City moving on from WWE but the world still yet to recover from the pandemic, he revealed he was contacted directly by Tony Khan who offered him the opportunity to bring his own brand of humour to AEW:
“I was working on a couple of different TV things, I was maybe going to do some weird things on the indies. The pandemic was still going on and it was slowly ending and then I tweeted something about one of those pitches that never made it, and next thing I know Tony Khan slid into my DMs and [asked if I was still with WWE].
“Then, he said ‘Do you wanna come do this, come do sit down interviews?’ It was the Road To where I was the chauffeur on the Road To Revolution and he had known of my work. I don’t understand how he knew of it, but he has an excellent comedy brain. He has his comedy brain, he knew kinda exactly what he wanted from me. Three weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything, so again, [I was like] ‘I have done something that has upset these people.’ Maybe Tony Schiavone said ‘No, not this guy.’ [laughs].
“Next thing I know, we’re at Revolution, right before it. We’re at Dark, I’m sitting in an SUV in a chauffeur hat with a crew and I’m going ‘No one’s gonna wanna do this. This is not gonna go well.’ Then, Paul Wight sat in the car and we had a nice time and that was that.”
Hey! (EW) hosted by RJ City drops on the AEW YouTube channel every Sunday morning and the series has already featured stars such as Jeff Jarrett, Adam Cole, Chris Jericho, and Taz.