Johnny Hungiee for gold and his first action figure!
John Silver recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet and talked about finding success last year with All Elite Wrestling as well as his goals for the future. Silver spoke about jobs he had before AEW, noting that it’s become a running joke, but he worked anywhere that would give him time in his schedule to wrestle on the side.
“When I got hired, I was working at a gym called Lifetime as a trainer. My girlfriend makes fun of me because I’ve had a million jobs. Since I was 18, I’ve worked in multiple pizza places, kickboxing instructor, multiple gyms. Basically, anything where I could make money but also get off so I can wrestle. I got lucky because Alex [Reynolds] also worked at Lifetime, but at a different location. I got hired because my boss used to wrestle and loved wrestling. He let me have the days off but I had to show up on the days I wasn’t wrestling.”
Silver made some appearances as an extra in WWE before, but he never thought it would lead to anything substantial. He explained that his work has been well-received, but didn’t think it was going any further than what it was.
“If you’re an extra, that means nothing, unless you are an extra that’s 6-foot-6 and jacked. If you’re not, they don’t care. How many people have been signed because they got squashed and WWE liked that? I knew it wasn’t very likely. Back in the day, they used to have you do matches during the day, and they would see if they liked you then. I’ve done extra work a bunch of times and I’ve had one match during the day against Alex. We had a good match it went 5 minutes, but I’m looking around and I don’t think anyone there is in a position to hire anyone. People said they liked it, but I never thought anything would come from it.”
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Silver caught fire with his work in the Dark Order and on Being the Elite, something he says started off as a one-off bit but ultimately translated to BTE influencing what happens on Dynamite.
“I don’t know if it was Uno’s idea or Matt Jackson’s for us. He mentioned that we should do some recruitment bits for BTE. Uno said it would be good for Johnny and Alex. The first thing we filmed was a reason why we should recruit people. We had us in the room, Brody comes in, throws the papers at Uno and we saw so many comments about that bit. After that we knew we needed to film stuff. We need Brodie, we need the whole group.”
“BTE is 100% our ideas, 100% stuff we say. It’s just us being us, no one is telling us to do anything. It’s cool that people are liking it, because that means they are liking us as people. There’s not much of a character that I’m playing, it’s just us joking around really. It’s crazy how much that affects Dynamite. If you stuff on BTE, people will start chanting it at the Dynamite shows.”
Silver said he can’t wait to have crowds back at shows, but he personally just hopes to remain a constant fixture on TV… and maybe some other perks if he’s fortunate.
“I want to keep the ball rolling forward. Right now, I really can’t wait until the full force crowds come back, it’s going to be a whole different world. I always want to be on TV and relevant. I don’t want to fall off for a few weeks. Of course, you want to win the belt. This year I want an action figure too.”
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