When it comes to pop culture, WWE tries to stay with the times. But like someone’s dad making a Getting Jiggy With It reference 10 years too late, Vince McMahon isn’t always on the cutting edge of what’s current. Big E and Kofi Kingston recently spoke with NDTV Gadgets 360 about that very subject and how The New Day are given more creative freedom than most of their WWE Superstar peers.
“We’ve been very fortunate. A lot of talent really don’t have that ability to just say ‘hey I want to rewrite this promo’ but it’s really helped us. And one thing we’ve noticed too is that as much as we – as a company – try to attach ourselves to pop culture, we felt also that a lot times they were a little outdated or a little bit, outside of their window of freshness.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
“We have a long leash for sure. That’s taken time to get trust from the higher ups and people of importance. But yeah, we don’t write everything. A lot of times we’re given scripts and we disagree with the script’s directions and we have some leniency to retool. A lot of times it’s ‘hey we need an overhaul and none of it works’ and sometimes it’s just a few tweaks here and there.”
Big E went on to reveal how The New Day stay on top of social media to keep their material current.
Up Next: WWE Removes Questionable RAW Segment From Social Media
“We’re on Twitter, we’re on Instagram, we like viral videos. It’s something we felt was needed in WWE. Something that was contemporary, something that was just hot on Instagram or Twitter or when Vine was still a thing, we wanted to implement that stuff immediately. Cause that’s the stuff we were just in the car buzzing over that made us laugh so why not use that the next day? I still vividly remember the hubbub over the Steph Curry shoes happened and when we talked in the car I think, it was a day later and we were in New Orleans and Kofi was all like ‘alright I gotta get these shoes’ and we wore them on TV and then we had to clown them for it.”
“But it’s things like that people enjoy. People want stuff that’s up to date, that feels current, that feels fresh, that’s in the zeitgeist, that’s still being talked about so that’s an element that we’ve tried to use to separate ourselves and we take a lot of pride in that.”
The New Day made their return to Talking Smack last week and should be returning to SmackDown any week now. You can listen to the entire interview here.
