During an appearance on the Spark In The Dark podcast, former WWE NXT wrestler Cezar Bonini talked about his time working for the brand. Bonini, who is from Brazil, discussed his struggles with coming to the United States:
“Of course I had talked to WWE before about applying for a Green Card. They never wanted to help me out with that. They said my case wasn’t strong enough, that it was better for me to stay on [a] P1 visa, which my wife cannot work any place. I can only work [for] WWE. If they fire me, I gotta go back [to Brazil] so there was a little bit of interest [for] them having me on that instead of a Green Card. So I called this attorney, he said this, ‘So, there’s two options. You got an EB2 visa which is an exception of abilities which applies to you. You got exceptional abilities on sports and arts, or we can just apply for a student visa then you gotta go to study English and you just can stay here and work part-time.’ Of course I don’t want that. So I go, ‘Okay, let’s go for this EB2.’ ‘There’s one problem. This EB2 is closed, nobody can apply for it and we don’t know when it’s gonna open,’ and I was [like], ‘Okay, I knocked on the [proverbial] door.’ I knocked on the door, right? But still, there’s this student visa stuff. So, I’m there, waiting two, three more days. Then I wake up one day, pick up my phone. First email, email from the attorney: ‘I don’t know what happened, but EB2 is open. You can apply for it right now.’ Like that. We had no idea. Then my wife wakes up and I, ‘Hey baby, you want some good news? EB2’s open’ and she [said], ‘Oh, you got news? I got news too’ and she showed me the test that she’s pregnant and we’d been trying for four years.”
“We did not have money to do anything. It took me two and a half years to go to [an] amusement park, living in Orlando, because money was so short that I could not do anything like that. It took them [WWE] a long time for them to help me out a little bit. Like, ‘Hey, here’s a raise.’ It took me almost two years. So, I was getting $600 for like six months [per week] then, when I finally got paid off, it felt like a raise because I was getting $750. Oh cool, I can buy a TV right now, but I cannot get cable and that’s how it was. It was hard in the beginning but that also helped me build my character even more.”
Bonini also talked about working with AEW:
“Whenever I got my papers, first thing, just hit up Tye Dillinger, Ronnie and he got me in contact with the guys from AEW, they invited me over, I went there. They treated me so good, different environment that I had no idea how to behave. I was like [how] I was in the WWE. Looking, not much looking people in the eyes, I had no idea what to do until one point, one of the refs just came to me and said, ‘Look, you’re not at the other place anymore. Just relax, talk to people, everybody’s cool’ and it’s true. Everybody’s cool, everybody [will] talk to you. Tony Khan called me by my name from far away, ‘Hey Cezar! How are you?’ And I was… like such a different environment.”
(quotes courtesy of PostWrestling.com)
