Trent Seven was the latest guest on Edge & Christian’s Pod Of Awesomeness; he spoke about taking pride in NXT, breaking into wrestling, acting and much more. Highlights and the full podcast are below:
Did you actually do some acting?
“What I wanted to do from a very young age was I always wanted to be an actor. I kind of followed that a bit more as I grew up rather than getting into wrestling. Then, the wrestling side of things grew a little bit more, so I stopped acting. It wasn’t a very popular thing at the school I went to. Wrestling became the go-to thing to do on the weekend. We bought a wrestling ring, we moved it inside and then we started wrestling and training and doing the kind of moves that we weren’t trained to do. What came of it is obviously wrestling, training, traveling around the world, and then you get a phone call from William Regal and that’s it.”
Did acting experience help you in your wrestling career?
“I definitely think it does. It’s not like I really trod the boards or had a lot of exposure. It was just something that you just practice on. There were plenty of local music videos that I would act or do little skits in. I did get that one cheeky little role in Transformers 5.
I think the one thing I got from that was a bit of exposure into how the industry works. That’s helped a bit more, especially going into developing a brand and starting something almost from the ground up. It’s an appreciation of how long things take and how quickly things can move. You would sit there seven, eight, nine, ten hours dressed as a Roman soldier. Then, for 20 minutes, you have to go out there and yell and perform at the craziest level and go completely mental after eating sausage for eight hours.
Watching the level of production that goes into everything that you don’t see. Hooks and runners and agents and people running around doing everything. That was the kind of thing that I took the most out of it. I feel like now that I look back at it, especially after being so excited about NXT UK, when you go RAW or SmackDown or a PPV for the first time, it’s kind of breathtaking how many people are involved and how many working cogs there are in the machine just to produce. There are 50 or 60 people for that one match to happen or that one tron to hit. That was the kind of stuff I got from working on a movie.”
What got you through the lean years?
“I do thank my lucky stars that me, Pete and Tyler are so geographically close. Us turning up at the same training schools and hanging up together all those years ago, you could definitely see that there was a part in all of us who wanted the same results out of all of this. I know that Pete was the first person out of our little group to go to Japan. I think he did a month, maybe more. As soon as he came back, I was like “Right teach me. Everything. What do they do?” How old is he at that stage? 18, 19 years old? He’s only 24 now. At 18,19 years old, he was my fountain of knowledge.
Me and a group of my other mates went to Japan, we only managed to go for 10 days. We went out with Big Japan going on crazy tours and doing this crazy deathmatch stuff. We got to wrestle at Kōrakuen Hall. I’m in no way scared to say that I paid for my own flights and accommodations. You just needed to go, you just needed to expand what you had. If you couldn’t get it here, you had to go somewhere else.
One of the main things, if I could give any advice if you want to be a professional wrestler, you got to wrestle. You have to learn every aspect of professional wrestling. You can’t say you want to be a carpenter but you’re just good at hanging doors. I want to be a painter but I’m only good at the wallpaper. You’ve got to try to master every aspect of your craft.”
What got you into wrestling?
“I very vividly remember WrestleMania 5, which is obviously showing my age a bit there. The first thing that I can solidly remember is WrestleMania 8, the Flair/Savage stuff. My dad kind of liked boxing, and then I remember this old lady who lived next door, she’d have some of the old British wrestling on. I’d go around there to eat the rest of her lunch and dinner and watch it there. I was like ‘Wow, this is better than boxing because they’re running around and wearing leotards and that’s cool.’
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t distinctly a fan of wrestling. I always loved the football, cricket, golf, the traditional English school stuff.”
Where did you go to seek out proper training?
“I went to this training school in Birmingham, just outside Wolverhampton, I think it was called AWW. Obviously, ECW is the coolest thing in the world so most companies are advertising themselves as that sort of thing. Some of the sessions were really good, we sweated and worked hard, and then some of the sessions were a bit rubbish. That kind of died down and then there wasn’t anyone to do the training. It’s more the fact that the people doing the training weren’t necessarily superstars and weren’t necessarily completely rubbish, it’s just that you reach a limit of how much you learn, and then you have to go someone else or find a more experienced trainer. We found The Hunter Bros, a well-known tag team in our parts.”
Related: Trent Seven On Taking Pride In NXT UK, Kyle O’Reilly Being The First ‘Real’ Wrestler He’d Seen
