Bernal speaks about the persona he brought forth to NXT.
In early May, there was a batch of WWE talent releases and one of the names included in that group was Javier Bernal. Bernal, now going by 'Javi,' made the media rounds ahead of his pending free agency.
One of his stops was a virtual signing with K & S WrestleFest. He spoke about the 'Big Body Javi' persona he introduced in NXT and shared that one of his inspirations was Chris Jericho when he was with WCW in 1997.
“You know, it’s funny because the way I thought of Big Body Javi and then the other way people thought of Big Body Javi and when I mean other people, I mean just creative. When you go into these creative meetings, you have your idea honestly, then you have their idea and there’s -- I’ll just say five. I don’t know how many but five people in a room so we’re all trying to figure out what one idea there is. So, Big Body Javi to me was like, I am so confident in a land of giants, I’m gonna call myself the biggest one, and also, it sounded cool. Big Body Javi. It just sounded frenetic, right? You can see from my gear even that I’m a very big fan of Chris Jericho. Specifically, this character was very inspired by WCW, ‘97 Jericho… Very arrogant, pompous. I wasn’t (born at that time). I was born -- I think I was alive when he did his WWF debut, I think. But that was about it. But very Van Halen, very Steel Panther. That’s like the best way to describe Big Body Javi and it was very arrogant, very fun though because you could -- as much as you hated it, you kind of liked him because he was funny… The Big Body Javi stuff is kind of where I got my break and I did these backstages with McKenzie (Mitchell), and again, going back to the Jericho thing, I did the Big Body Files where I had a list of (names) on a computer sheet of paper and it would list people I’d wanna wrestle. The Man of a thousand and one holds type of gimmick."
In a separate media appearance, Bernal opened up about his release from WWE and to read his comments, click here.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit K & S WrestleFest with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.
