AEW star Miro was interviewed on the Kurt Angle podcast to talk about his early days in the wrestling business, his wife Lana, AEW and a lot more.
Miro said it was Dusty Rhodes’ idea to pair Miro with Lana:
“The American Dream Dusty Rhodes. Dusty Rhodes is so brilliant. He was so smart. Dusty was so brilliant. Then CJ my wife, Lana, she had just gotten signed in May or something. We got to meet them, and then it was not two weeks later, Dusty found out she could speak perfect English and perfect Russian. They knew they had me. I feel like they were already kind of looking at me because I had this dark match with Dolph Ziggler that Triple H was there. He got to see and he asked who I was. From then on I think we just rode that gravy train because then CJ came in. We started doing promos together. When you’re in developmental, you just want to do funny stuff because everybody laughs. You get instant laughter. Then one day we’re told, ‘Hey guys, you should try something serious’, and we did. We did try something serious. We got inspiration from Rocky IV, Drago and Ludmilla. We rolled with that and Triple H loved it.”
Miro said him and Lana started out as friends:
“We were friends. We shared a connection. She grew up in Latvian for 12 years, which is, you know, Eastern Block, kind of the same mentality, dealing with the same crazy coaches yelling at you cursing each other and all that. So she’d been to Bulgaria. We share a lot of experiences. We talk Russian to each other as well. I said from the beginning I don’t want to complicate this. First of all, she’s out of my league, clearly, so I don’t want to even try to get my heart broken. I’m just gonna be friends with her. We’re gonna have a professional level and that’s it. But, you know, a week or two, a month came in, we started texting more and more. And one thing led to the other, and here we go.”
Miro said it was Triple H who fought for Rusev and Lana to be brought up to the main roster together:
“There was a question if Lana was going to debut (on SmackDown with Rusev) because that was also another issue that we had with Vince. Vince always loves his big monsters by themselves, and he thinks that the women take away from the heat, but thanks to Triple H, he fought for it. He believed in me and Lana as a unit, as a package. Thankfully to that, we debuted on SmackDown. We started doing the vignettes with CJ, which I thought was absolutely the better choice. I don’t think Rusev by himself would be as over without Lana being there. He was so much better.”
Miro talking about being released by WWE:
“I was so happy. Like, I kind of lost it for 30 seconds. The whole pandemic thing was happening, and we were just trying to fight for some kind of rights, you know, because it’s not right that we have to fly every week to TV in all these circumstances without anybody caring. I just didn’t think it was right. We were in a little group text that got leaked out to the office. Somebody leaked that we were doing this. It’s not even a plot. We’re just talking among ourselves. How can we bring that to the office? It leaked out that we were on it, and I think a few days later I was released. I lost it for a little bit because I was more concerned about the health and the safety protocol. I got released, but I was so happy because I knew right away that I’m going to go and do what I know I can do. I never had any doubts how good I am, and if your company doesn’t appreciate me, I’m going to go find a different company that does.”
There was a lot more discussed during the interview. Miro talked about training under Gangrel and Rikishi, Rikishi’s ribbing, working for FCW, his broken neck, WrestleMania 31, his US Title win, winning the TNT Title and more.
h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
