Former WWE star Javier Bernal participated in a virtual signing for K&S WrestleFest, where he talked about various topics, including how Chris Jericho inspired his “Big Body Javi” character in WWE NXT.
Bernal said, “You know, it’s funny because the way I thought of Big Body Javi and then the other way people thought of Big Body Javi — and when I mean other people, I mean just creative. When you go into these creative meetings, you have your idea honestly, then you have their idea and there’s — I’ll just say five. I don’t know how many but five people in a room so we’re all trying to figure out what one idea there is. So, Big Body Javi to me was like, I am so confident in a land of giants, I’m gonna call myself the biggest one, and also, it sounded cool. Big Body Javi. It just sounded frenetic, right? You can see from my gear even that I’m a very big fan of Chris Jericho. Specifically, this character was very inspired by WCW, ‘97 Jericho… Very arrogant, pompous. I wasn’t (born at that time). I was born — I think I was alive when he did his WWF debut, I think. But that was about it. But very Van Halen, very Steel Panther. That’s like the best way to describe Big Body Javi and it was very arrogant, very fun though because you could — as much as you hated it, you kind of liked him because he was funny… The Big Body Javi stuff is kind of where I got my break and I did these backstages with McKenzie (Mitchell), and again, going back to the Jericho thing, I did the Big Body Files where I had a list of (names) on a computer sheet of paper and it would list people I’d wanna wrestle. The Man of a thousand and one holds type of gimmick.”
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
