Damian Priest was recently interviewed on the Battleground podcast. Here are a couple of highlights from the interview:
Damian Priest was asked, “Whose idea was it for you and Bad Bunny to pair up?”:
“I don’t know whose idea initially it was to pair us up. I do know that initially we were supposed to be paired. He came to the Performance Center and I met him there the week before the Royal Rumble. We hit it off immediately. We grew up in the same town in Puerto Rico, and just our mindset of how we handle ourselves where people tell us that to make it, we had to change the way we speak, and the way we dress, and conform to whatever. We never agreed with that. To succeed is to make it on your terms, not on somebody else’s. We had that in common, and then we were super fans of this business. We became instant friends. The day before the Royal Rumble, it got scrapped. I wasn’t supposed to be a part of it. Come the Royal Rumble, it was back on. I know for instance, HHH said, ‘I don’t know why they told you that was going to change, but no, we’re still going to go with this because this is more realistic. It’s an actual thing that you’re friends.’ To go along with that, it was also Bad Bunny, where they told him they were going to switch it, and he actually spoke up and said, ‘No, I want to work with Priest.’ That’s actually really cool because if he would have said, ‘Ok, yea, I would rather work with somebody else’, they would have given him whatever he wanted, but he specifically said he wanted me to work with him.”
Priest talked about Bad Bunny’s dedication to this angle:
“People can talk about when celebrities come, they’re promoting and doing stuff. The guy moved from Puerto Rico to Florida just to train during a pandemic. It wasn’t like he can go out and have fun in Florida, in Orlando, and do different things. There’s nothing to do. Like I said, we were in the beginning of a pandemic. He wanted to put in the work. He didn’t want to come in here and just be that celebrity that was in and out. He wanted to make his fans proud, our fans proud, and his fandom proud because he is a huge fan. He understands the respect that’s needed to be put into this business to be successful. He did everything the right way, and it showed. He deserved the moment he had. He deserved the respect he gained from not just his peers and us, but the fans.”
