Swerve Strickland was cooking in Lucha Underground.
Before having runs in WWE and AEW, Strickland spent a number of years in Lucha Underground as the Killshot character. Killshot's run in Lucha Underground is primarily remembered for his feud with Dante Fox (AR Fox).
While speaking to the WrestleChat podcast for a new interview, Strickland revealed that he wrote the entire Killshot character by himself.
“I wrote it all myself. For me, I always take an initiative on things when I’m not asked to do certain things. I always have something ready to go, that’s kind of how my career’s path has carved the way it has. There hasn’t been much, oh he’s a blank slate, let’s put him wherever. I don’t want to just be an empty shape, I wanna have something and some life to it. They brought me on season one, I came up with the name Killshot and they just kind of created the mask and a outfit based off of that name. I didn’t have a background for the character. So when season one had the break going into season two, I wanted to flush out the character a little bit more. Through that time, I wrote the character out and put three different ways he can be incorporated into the show. The head writer, Christopher DeJoseph, he really liked all of them so he’s like, ‘Okay, I love that, so I’m gonna kinda compile and mix and see what we can do to write this character into certain things. The next thing you know, Killshot is born and the vignettes of me doing combat in Iraq in the army. They started creating and it was a collab effort in the sense, that’s where it really got to what it became later on and it got so unique that it created another character with Dante Fox and then it created match stipulations off the character from what I based it off of. When you give the idea, they started having fun with it and then I started having fun performing within the idea.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Strickland said that a promotion like Lucha Underground wouldn't fair well in today's wrestling climate. Learn more here.
Prince Nana returned to AEW on the May 22 edition of Dynamite. Learn more about the return here.
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