AEW star Willow Nightingale spoke with Cameron Hawkins for Yahoo Uncrowned about her rise in the company.
Nightingale said, “I’ve been on a little bit of a ride at AEW, from where I started to now, because I definitely think I started as an extra. I came in relatively unknown. I would say a little bit of an indie darling, maybe. But the greater audience really didn’t know who I was. Every time I went out, there wasn’t necessarily a pressure to uphold something because there wasn’t anything to uphold yet. It was like, ‘Just lay out who you are, and that’s all you have to do. You just have to be yourself.’ Then it was like, ‘OK, well, I’ve set a little bit of a bar for myself. I have to do this.’”
On when she found out about the Women’s Blood & Guts Match and being part of the match:
“I found out we were doing ‘Blood & Guts’ when Jamie Hayter announced it in the ring, and I was at home watching TV. I think it’s so cool to really just be like, [myself and my teammates are the ones] we’re sending to the front lines. We’re the Marines. I think it’s cool, but I didn’t know if I would fit into it. Then one day AEW were like, ‘Hey, we need to get some shots for a ‘Blood & Guts’ video package. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in Blood & Guts? OK, let’s rock and roll, baby.’ That is when the excitement went from proud of everybody, proud of the team, proud of the division, to being like, ‘Yeah, let’s go. Smash some skulls.’”
On being a fan of Deathmatch wrestling:
“I was a huge deathmatch wrestling fan before I started wrestling. CZW, Tournament of Death, Cage of Death, through there, Big Japan Wrestling … I was a big Danny Havoc fan. So that’s really more so the stuff that I had been watching before I started wrestling. And then when I started doing it, everybody was like, ‘You don’t want to scar your body. Don’t do that.’ Then I finally get to TV and they’re like, ‘Hey, do you want to do the blood-and-guts stuff?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I want to do the blood-and-guts stuff.’ That’s really where it comes from.”
On staying true to herself:
“My life’s work, everything I have done in wrestling up to this point, to me, it needs to happen as myself, my authentic self, without ever having to compromise or change who I am for anybody else. To win the big one in the company that I love as myself, being the person I am, care-free, Black joy, big girl, never changing for anyone and just being myself and accomplishing something that grand, I think is the biggest story I can tell.”
