Freddie Prinze Jr. and The Bella Twins reflect on their time working together in WWE.
The most recent episode of Freddie Prinze Jr.’s ‘Wrestling with Freddie’ podcast featured The Bella Twins (Nikki & Brie Bella). They conversed about The Bella Twins’ early days in WWE and how Freddie, Michael Hayes and fellow writer Angelo Fazio had been pitching ideas to bring them to the main roster from developmental.
Their ideas were constantly rejected and it got to a point where Nikki and Brie leveraged themselves against the company. They told management to either bring them to the main roster or they’ll leave.
Prinze Jr.: Right where I wanna start which is when I was working there [WWE] and you two were down in Florida in FCW and Michael Hayes really wanted to get you guys up and our ideas just kept getting shot down, shot down and shot down again no matter — and I’m telling you, me and another writer Angelo [Fazio] must’ve pitched a dozen ideas in a month and no matter what we did, they wouldn’t get over and Freebird goes, ‘We’re gonna do the twin magic. That’s how we’re gonna get em on’ and I didn’t even know what that was, okay, so I’m just like, ‘Whatever gets em on’ and then I don’t even know if y’all even know this but the way we were able to bring you up was when you leveraged yourselves against the company and basically gave them a referendum, ‘Bring us up or we walk’ and all the — so many people have tried to give me credit over the years for The Bella Twins and I’m always like, ‘Y’all don’t understand. These women knew their worth and knew their value long, long, long ago’ and I don’t even know if you guys remember that moment, but I was just wondering if you did, if that was a plan or where were your heads at when that happened.
Brie: So you know, it’s interesting because we actually do give you a lot of credit though because, for so — when we were down in FCW for so long, they kept being like, ‘Well we just don’t know what to do with twins’ and we were kind of like, ‘Huh? Seems like it writes itself. It’s a natural gimmick.’ But it was your ideas that you kept pushing that I think it made the company, a lot of people at the time see like, ‘Okay, there is something special’ and the greatest thing is there was no social media. So we could really hide the fact that like — and FCW didn’t have television at the time so really nobody knew Nicole and I, like at all, that there was twins, unlike locally in Tampa, yeah, they knew twins were wrestling down there but in the whole global WWE world, people didn’t know so, it was really the timing but it wasn’t Nikki as much as it was me because they kept saying they had no ideas. I had, at the time, a boyfriend who was like, ‘You gave up everything for wrestling. At what time do you start to give back to the people who were there with you? You never see your family, I’m here alone all the time’ and all that and I was like, ‘That’s a really good point.’ So I was the one who pushed it. I was like, ‘Listen, let us not — if you honestly don’t think — you told us at Diva Search you didn’t go looking for two. We begged to then try out again. We drove here, we’re getting paid peanuts. Like be honest, if you have no idea what to do with twins, we can go somewhere else’ and I think it did [speed up the process].
Prinze Jr.: Oh, it 100 percent did. I was in the room when it happened. So I know for a fact it was that. I mean that’s what they needed. They needed motivation and Vince [McMahon] sees that as people being assertive, right? Where it’s like in showbiz, in Hollywood at least, if a woman is assertive, she’s difficult, right? If a man is assertive, ‘Man, that guy doesn’t take sh*t off of anybody’ and I’ve always sort of gravitated towards people like that because that’s who my mother — I was raised by a single mom so she had to be twice as strong.
And you guys did that [stood up for yourselves] when I don’t think any other talent in FCW didn’t know they had the leverage or didn’t have the guts necessarily to say, ‘I’m willing to walk away.’
Nikki and Brie have relaunched their podcast as a part of SiriusXM and are working on several projects outside of pro wrestling. They’ve spoken about the idea of returning to the ring at various points over the past several years. They both have not wrestled in a sanctioned match since 2018.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit ‘Wrestling with Freddie’ with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
