TNA Wrestling star Steph De Lander spoke with Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful on various topics, including how she needs to leave her WWE NXT persona, Persia Pirotta, behind as she moves forward into a new phase of her career.
De Lander said, “It’s cool and it’s interesting too because when I first started teaming with Matt Cardona, he would always say like, ‘Persia is dead, Zack Ryder is dead, like that’s done.’ At the start, I was kind of like, ‘Yo, can you stop saying that? Because like if I need to be Persia again, like I don’t want to kill her and then in two years have to be like, ‘Hey.’ But retrospectively looking back, it’s kind of like he had to have that acceptance that Zack Ryder was done, and he’s now Matt Cardona, and then I had to go through it myself and have that acceptance of like, Persia is done, and now I’m Steph De Lander. It’s funny. At first I was resistant to it just because when I picked that name, I didn’t think I would have that name for one year and then be back to Steph De Lander. So, letting go of that was kind of like letting go of my WWE career at that time. But now I’m like, yeah, it’s pretty freaking cool that what I’ve done now so surpasses what I did at WWE.”
You can check out De Lander’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
