“So, I pitched the idea at the time and apparently the first thing Vince [McMahon] said at the time was, ‘Is he going to have an accent?’ That wasn’t something I was planning on doing. The idea that I had was to not portray it in this kind of way.”
“And I remember I was really strongly against it at first because it didn’t make sense to me. As a kid, I had a lot of Nigerian-American friends, so we would imitate our parents and do that accent a lot as kids. And my brother and sister would pretend, put on the accent to imitate my dad and stuff, but by no means did I think I would be doing it on TV in front of millions of people or anything to that level.”
“I felt strongly about it. I went and spoke to Vince and pleaded my case against it. Obviously, I was talked into it. And I was like, ‘Okay, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it 100%.’ And somehow I used a lot of the — how my dad was like growing up, and I was able to immerse myself in this character. Some people loved it, some people hated it, but people were talking about it. And it was, overnight, I became, I don’t know if it was a Prince or what it was, but I became this character with an accent and did a 360 on the character.
“I remember the first promo we were going to do, I was going to do it with my regular accent, my normal, regular accent now, and I think 10 minutes before the show started he wanted me to do one line with an accent. Ten minutes before the show started, they told me he wanted me to do the whole thing with the accent. I was like, ‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Ten minutes before. That’s what a lot of people will never understand. The things that go on right before you go out the curtain. People can’t understand it unless they are in the situation. I’m not the only person that’s happened to.”
