One of the standout aspects of Indi Hartwell’s transition from WWE to TNA Wrestling is that she managed to retain her well-established ring name—a rare feat for anyone departing WWE. In a recent appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, Hartwell revealed the backstory behind keeping her name and the unexpectedly humorous origin of “Indi Hartwell.”
“How’d you get to keep your name?” Van Vliet asked.
“I just asked,” Hartwell replied with a laugh, before elaborating. “So I’ve had this name my whole wrestling career.”
She explained that early in her WWE run, she was given a unique opportunity to use the name on NXT programming.
“I think I had a dark match at NXT. And I just asked Road Dogg, like, ‘Can I be Indi Hartwell for this?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll ask. Why not?’ And then they let me be Indi Hartwell for the dark match. And then it kind of just like, kept going.”
As the name began appearing on TV, action figures, and video games, it became synonymous with her WWE persona.
However, things changed during the NXT 2.0 era, when WWE began enforcing stricter rules around intellectual property.
“They went through that whole weird thing of, like, you can’t have your real name, and you also can’t have a name that we don’t own. So they gave me the option to change my name or sell it to them. So I sold it to them.”
Even after making that decision, Hartwell admitted the possibility of release lingered in the back of her mind—and with it, anxiety about losing the name.
“It was always in the back of my mind, like, oh my gosh, if I get released… What name am I going to be? Like, that’s a big deal to me.”
When her release eventually came in November, Hartwell was prepared. She acted immediately to reclaim her name.
“They said, ‘okay, yeah, we’re releasing you.’ I said, ‘okay, cool. Um, so I sold my name to the company. Is there any way I can get that back?’ And then we got it all figured out. I got the rights and stuff to it.”
Van Vliet noted how rare this situation was, to which Hartwell replied:
“Yeah, I’m very lucky… The fact that you can keep your name, that makes this transition that much easier. Yeah, 100% I’m really blessed, because like most people only know me as Indi.”
As for the name’s origin, Hartwell shared a delightfully unexpected tale.
“This is funny, because I use the porn star method,” she joked, referencing the tongue-in-cheek name generator formula. “You know who Iggy Azalea is? …This was like, before I started wrestling, like, I’m a big fan of her, and that’s how she got her name, right? So then me and my friend, we were like, just coming up with our porn star name, and it was like, your dog name plus your street name, I think, yeah. And then Indi Hartwell was my friend’s dog name and street name.”
Years later, when a promoter asked for a ring name, it came to her instantly.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know, Indi Hartwell.’ And then that’s, that’s what it was.”
There’s also a happy coincidence tied to her brand.
“There’s no other Indi’s in wrestling that I know of, but also the whole like Indi Hartwell, indie wrestling, I’m indi wrestling. So it all worked out very well.”
That synergy lives on through her new personal website, IndiWrestling.com—a fitting brand extension for a talent whose identity in and out of the ring is truly her own.
Stay tuned to PWMania.com for more exclusive features, interviews, and behind-the-scenes stories from the world of pro wrestling.
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
