Chris Jericho dives into the piecing together of the ‘Five Labours’.
On the lead up to Chris Jericho’s match against MJF at AEW All Out, he had a number of challenges he had to get past which were titled the ‘Five Labours of Jericho’. First up for Jericho was Shawn Spears, followed by Nick Gage then Juventud Guerrera, Wardlow and the final ‘labour’ was MJF and in that match, MJF tapped Jericho out.
While speaking to Stephanie Chase, Jericho dove into piecing together the ‘five labours’ story and revealed that Chris Hero’s name was tossed around to be one of the ‘labours’. Jericho said the plan was to always start with Spears and end with Wardlow before getting to MJF. When it comes to Juventud’s arrival in AEW, that was in the works for months.
Well the original plan was gonna be the four guys from The Pinnacle, because that’s what we had kind of done with [Jon] Moxley when he beat me for the title where he kind of had to go through the whole Inner Circle. But I think it was MJF who had an idea of let’s use Nick Gage and I had never heard of Nick Gage prior to Dark Side of the Ring and that kind of intrigued me to think, ‘Okay, well maybe he brings in some bounty hunters’ but I still wanted it to start and end with The Pinnacle because that was the story. Start with [Shawn] Spears, end with Wardlow. That was always the plan. It was never the plan of like go through this memory lane of Jericho’s friends or opponents or whatever so we thought the Nick Gage deathmatch would be cool and then we were trying to think of another guy and one of the ideas was Chris Hero. There was a couple of other names thrown around and then we thought, I thought, ‘Well Juventud Guerrera might be a good idea’ because he just seemed to fit. It seemed to fit best. It seemed like a good idea to have one guy from my past in there and I didn’t wanna make it a bunch of guys from my past. [People] were like, ‘Oh it’s gotta be Lance Storm. It’s got to be this’ and I didn’t want that. I just wanted The Pinnacle to start and end it, the deathmatch I thought was a cool idea and then have somebody from my past which we decided Juventud was the best choice for that, and we had worked on that for a few months, to get his visa and all that sort of thing so that was always the plan to do those four guys and there was an idea maybe to face [Jake] Hager or maybe have Sammy [Guevara] come in but I didn’t like that idea either because why would they fight me? ‘Because they have to or else.’ It’s like well we would just quit. Like I said, we don’t turn on each other and if that was the idea, ‘Fine, go f*ck yourself, we’re out.’ So that didn’t work for me either so Juventud was the way to go and Wardlow was the way to go to finish it and that’s what we did.
Although The Inner Circle (Chris Jericho, Sammy Guevara, Santana, Ortiz & Jake Hager) are still intact, members of the group have gone off into their own stories in AEW. Jericho said he pitched the idea of ‘respectfully disbanding’ the group but that idea was vetoed by Tony Khan.
Yeah, pretty much [The Inner Circle still being a group but not together all the time]. My idea was for us to like respectfully disband and go our own ways but Tony [Khan] didn’t wanna do that. He said, ‘Why would you want to disband the group?’ You don’t have to be together all the time but you’re still The Inner Circle’ and once again, I think after this year where it was The Inner Circle, the whole storyline was based around MJF wanting to join The Inner Circle and Wardlow’s in The Inner Circle and then The Pinnacle and kind of five-on-five and that sort of thing so, it was a really well told year-long story with the five of us so it’s time for us to kind of go our own ways and not be in each other’s business every week, and it’s good that we’re still aligned. Like I said, for me, I thought it was a good time to kind of like, ‘Okay, well let’s go our own way’ but we can still do that without officially disbanding the band, officially breaking up the band type of a thing so I love the fact that we have been a faction since day one in AEW and really never had any fights amongst us or anything like that. There’s been a few minor things but we never turned on each other. Half the group didn’t turn heel and half the group stayed babyface and fight with each other. We never did that and I think that’s a pretty cool accomplishment, especially in wrestling because factions come and go so quickly.
The Inner Circle’s Sammy Guevara is getting a shot at Miro’s TNT Championship on the 9/29 Dynamite in Rochester, New York. Jericho and Hager were in action at the Rampage Grand Slam taping which can be read about at this link.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Stephanie Chase with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
