It’s a DX reunion!
Paul “Triple H” Levesque and Shawn Michaels met at WWE headquarters in Stamford, CT, earlier this month to interview each other for Variety. The full interview can be seen below.
Levesque, who is now the chief content officer for WWE, and Michaels, the head of creative for WWE’s developmental brand NXT, are both Hall of Famers with legendary in-ring careers. But now, they are responsible for shaping the next generation of WWE superstars.
Both Levesque and Michaels pointed to rising star Je’Von Evans as a current WWE talent they have high hopes for in the future. Evans is known for his incredible high-flying maneuvers, but Levesque has advised him to focus on fundamentals.
“Focus on punches, kicks. Focus on this other stuff,” Levesque said. “Because a year from now, there’ll be a kid doing s–t that you’ll be like, ‘How’s he doing that?’… I said, “You got to have all that other stuff. Otherwise that quickly goes by the wayside.”
Leveque compared Evans to Michales during his in-ring career, saying, “The fast paced and the flying stuff is just what got you looked at. All the other stuff, the fundamentals of everything else — punches, kicking, you being a pit bull, you selling so emotionally and investing people — that’s what got you over. The other stuff just made you look.”
The iconic duo also discussed the rise of Trick Williams, who will make his WrestleMania debut this weekend in a WWE United States Championship against Sami Zayn. Michaels, who worked with Williams during the latter’s time in NXT, felt that Williams made a great babyface (a good guy in wrestling parlance), but needed to spend more time as a heel (bad guy).
“In my mind, he hadn’t quite understood the benefits of what your heels do for you as a babyface,” Michaels said. “And I needed him to kind of jump on that other side to try to understand that now he was going to have to be that guy that certainly gets his stuff over and continues to do his stuff, but has to now make that other individual and to understand how much work and effort and psychology goes into that.”
Michaels and Levesque then got into how they build characters for the modern WWE audience. But these are not the type of characters that were prevalent early in their careers.
“We’re not talking about a garbage man or a clown,” Michaels said. “We’re just talking about a part of your personality or something that is of interest to you. So that’s sort of a process that we go through, is they come in to just at least have them thinking about how do they see themselves being portrayed if they were going to make it on NXT?”
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