Dijak Recalls Pitching Current NXT Character To Vince McMahon – NXT star Dijak recently appeared on the Stick To Wrestling program to hype up tomorrow’s Battleground premium live event, where he will be taking on Ilja Dragunov in a Last Man Standing match.
The former RETRIBUTION member also discussed a ton of topics surrounding his career, most notably how he ended up with his current character incarnation.
Dijak begins by recalling the moment he knew he had to try and make a change after his run on the main roster hit a glass ceiling of only performing on Main Event.
It was sometime around WrestleMania last year and we were doing the T-BAR stuff and I was on Main Event every week and it wasn’t what I envisioned for myself as a WWE wrestler. And just toward the tail end of that, I was barely ever on TV. I think in 2022, I was on Raw maybe twice and one of ‘em was a Battle Royal, the other was getting squashed by Omos so it wasn’t what I wanted out of the WWE. I was happy to have a job, I was happy that they kept me employed, I was happy to be in the ring every week on Main Event in front of a large crowd, working guys who are great. Like Mustafa Ali and Cedric Alexander, Shelton Benjamin. There was this rotation of guys on the show Main Event. Unfortunately, there kind of still is. They’re integrating NXT guys a little bit more. It’s a good spot in some aspects but it’s not the spot that anybody covets.
He later says that he had a conversation with Vince McMahon about shifting his character to something more sinister. He revealed that his favorite movies were Seven and Sin City and was hoping to create a persona that lived in that world, an idea that Vince McMahon enjoyed.
Nobody dreams about being on Main Event for the rest of their — you know, it’s a good spot to be on a few times but everybody wants to main event WrestleMania… It’s a tough spot to be in and I wanted to express that to Mr. McMahon so I met with him and we had a great conversation, a 20 minute conversation. He asked me about my background, my life, all that stuff and I told him about my legitimate background in Criminal Justice. I have an undergraduate and graduate degree from Bridgewater State where I played two sports, but I have these graduate degrees in Criminal Justice. I told him my favorite movies are the movies ‘Seven’ and ‘Sin City’. These sort of crime-based, film noir dramas and stuff and he collected all this information in the most kind of feedback I got from him was, ‘There’s something about the criminal mind. I like that. There’s something there’ and I said, ‘Okay. I agree with that. I never really looked at it from that perspective. I think that’s wonderful’ so I drafted this whole character, I gave the notes to the writers, I gave it to him and honestly, not much ever came of it. I don’t know if sat on the backburner, I don’t know if they wanted to get to it, I don’t know if whatever happened and then there was this bit of a paradigm shift and transition in terms of creative leadership and I started having conversations more so with Hunter instead.
Once he found out that the transition back to NXT was in place Dijak says he was having conversations with Shawn Michaels and Matt Bloom. Fortunately, he already had his new character presentation mapped out because he did it already for Vince McMahon.
I had this meeting with Shawn (Michaels) and Matt (Bloom) and Johnny (Russo). I think those were the three in the room… And as soon as I sat down with them, I had the presentation ready, just because I had already done it for Vince and I even filmed an extra vignette that I just talked about where I lighted it and I did the smoke and they looked at it and they said, ‘This is spectacular’ and when you hear, ‘This is great. We’re gonna run with it’ in WWE, I’ve heard that before and it doesn’t always happen. So I heard them say that and I said, okay. I’ve worked with these guys before. They’ve never done me wrong. That being said, this is still WWE. I’m gonna take everything with a grain of salt and to their credit, three or four weeks later, they started the backstage stuff and we started filming the vignettes and I said, wow, this is pretty much exactly what I pitched and envisioned and they were right on board and we’ve been moving and advancing from that stage ever since and I could not possibly be happier with the presentation.
Dijak Recalls Pitching Current NXT Character To Vince McMahon
