Malakai Black discusses the growth of his on-screen character.
Since the summer of 2021, Malakai Black has been a part of All Elite Wrestling. He was in action on the 12/22 episode of Dynamite and scored a win over Griff Garrison. The match came about after Malakai sprayed mist into the eyes of Julia Hart.
Malakai’s character development over the years is one he has touched on-on multiple occasions. He dove more into it on the latest episode of ‘Casual Conversations with The Classic’.
Black admitted that there have been mutual errors and mistakes made with his character while he was in NXT, on WWE’s main roster and in AEW. He added that those mistakes are needed so that they can be pinpointed and corrected.
So for me, the character work sticks and the wrestling progresses slowly. I… I wanna perceived as effective and efficient and sure, you know, and I’ll be the first one to sometimes also say that both in NXT and WWE and AEW, yeah, we’ve made some errors, we’ve made some mistakes but you know, you also need to make mistakes to realize what you’ve done wrong so you can correct it again. Nothing is always ever absolute, right? So it’s all about finding what you need to change and redoing it and sometimes there was decisions that I made, sometimes it was decisions that they made, you know what I mean? It’s just — but, you get this whole… you get this whole track record of all the things that you knew went well so you start building off it and a lot of times, young wrestlers ask me about that character stuff, right? And I always tell them, you know, ‘Try ten things out. If nine fail, well at least you have one thing that didn’t fail and from that one thing, you start building again.’
During his early conversations with AEW President Tony Khan, Malakai explained to Khan that everyone knows he can produce when it’s time to get in the ring. He wanted to make sure that he could present something different character-wise in AEW that was separate from but connected to ‘Tommy End’ and ‘Aleister Black’.
I had this conversation with Tony [Khan] at the beginning [that] was, ‘Everybody knows I can have crazy matches, you know? That’s not the issue.’ The issue is also not the character work but I wanted to give AEW something that was a… it was Tommy End, it was Aleister Black and now it’s this guy and you know, because a lot of people don’t realize that I got signed by WWE because of the Tommy End, cult-type character that I’d been doing for like years and years prior to that. If you look at my work in ICW and even also in PROGRESS a little later on, it was the exact same type of character, just not with as many bells and whistles because obviously, how I think about wrestling ten years ago versus now is obviously completely different, you know? And a lot of the ideas that I had back then were cool but now they’re great because now, I understand them better. It’s a journey, right? So I can convey them better to this audience.
A new Malakai Black vignette aired on AEW programming and he told a hooded individual that going forward, they’ll be “more than just a king.”
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Wrestling Classic with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
