In an interview with tvserieshub.tv, Mandy Rose discussed how her storyline with Otis got started:
“Otis always was around in NXT and posting pics of me and talking about how much he liked me. In a cute way, not a creepy way. This continued on and I thought it would be great if this became a storyline, especially once Otis entered Wrestlemania. I actually went to Vince McMahon myself and pitched the idea and he loved it.”
“My boyfriend doesn’t have an issue with it. It’s all a storyline and entertainment. If he got jealous of this, or if any guy did, it wouldn’t work out, honestly.”
On a recent After The Bell podcast, Otis went into detail about what he did to start the storyline:
“Then just one day, I was sitting down. And she was posting all of her beautiful pictures online, I said, ‘What if I post a picture of her modeling pics, and say,’ ‘You look great babe?” And pretty soon that one post, there was comments than actual likes, because there was so many people that was just confused as to what was going on.
“And then a week later on Google, it said — when you typed in Otis, it would say, ‘Otis and Mandy, are they really married?,’ or something like that on the search bar [autocomplete]. I’m like, ‘Oh man this is kind of getting a little attention here.’ So I just kept on trying to be like pretend creeping. Kind of just posting here on a post saying, ‘Hey, you look great in this.’ I would pretend she was my girlfriend. But it was was obvious at the time, that she’s not, you know what I mean? It was just kind of a thing I was goofing around with. And we finally got it going on in the WWE world. And she’s awesome to work with too man. We have a blast, so it’s basically working for free.”
