Natalya recalls the challenges she faced leading up to her WWE debut during the Divas Era.
It may sound surprising, but WWE superstar Natalya is currently experiencing a career renaissance outside the company. Nattie Neidhart, as she prefers to be called outside WWE, has made a strong impression in promotions such as GCW and AAA.
However, competing outside WWE was hardly an option during the Divas Era, when performers had to conform to Vince McMahon’s vision to find success in the company.
As Natalya revealed during a recent appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, her WWE debut was far from smooth, as she had to take certain measures just to appease her then-boss.
“It was so difficult because I realized that I couldn’t dance to save my life,” Natalya recalled. “I tried so, so hard. I took dance classes, I hired private coaches to try to [teach me], because I had always heard Vince loved dancing. So I wanted to learn, let me learn how to dance. They’ll love that. I sucked at it. I wrote about that in the book. But I was like, I gotta try to lose weight. I gotta try to be thin. I gotta look like Torrie Wilson. I always had Torrie on this pedestal because she’s to me, I love her physique and she’s so beautiful. I was like, I always wanted to look like Torrie, but I couldn’t, because my body’s not like Torrie’s.”
Natalya explains how she changed her approach
“I realized that all these things that I thought that they wanted at that time, I was like, ‘I know what they’ll like. What if I made every single girl I worked with look like gold? What if I was the, maybe not the star, but you know what I can do really well, I’ll be the star maker. I’ll be Vince’s Star Maker.’ I wanted to be Vince’s Star Maker. I wanted to be the girl that Vince would go, or creative would go, ‘put her with Nattie.’
“Because when I was first getting started, I was like, ‘they don’t want me. They don’t want this. I’m never going to be them. I’m never going to look like Torrie. I’m never going to look like Kelly Kelly. But you know what I can do? I can make those girls look like a million bucks, and that will be how I get my in.’ And I actually started to look at myself the way that I felt like they were looking at me, where I was like, ‘I don’t really know if I’m worthy of being the champion, I don’t think I am.'”
Elsewhere in the same interview, Natalya talked about her new gimmick under Triple H’s creative leadership. Fans can check out her full comment here.
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