Xavier Woods recently spoke with Alex McCarthy for GiveMeSport; you can read a few highlights and listen to the full show below.
(Transcription credit to Bill Pritchard for Wrestlezone.com)
Woods talks about Daniel Bryan being featured in WWE 2K19‘s Showcase Mode, what feature he’d like to see return:
I do think it’s awesome that the [WWE 2K] Showcase mode is back with Daniel Bryan because he does have such an interesting, unique story. I don’t ever remember there being one person who was like, ‘nah Daniel Bryan’s OK…’ He’s the man, and so being able to play through this story will be really cool. Getting to play through that moment of Wrestlemania [30], having the two matches in one night, that will be dope.
I would say the thing I want in the 2K [WWE] games is GM Mode. I want it so bad. It would be so good, to be able to do it with updated rosters, and every time a WWE 2K game comes out it’s the largest roster ever, especially with the Create-A-Wrestler you can download legitimately anybody. Being able to those into GM mode would blow everyone’s mind because you’d be able to be back in the old days. I don’t know if you were ever in ‘e-feds’ back in the day, but we’d send each other messages on AOL Instant Messenger, like type your promo out and they’d put it in the program, you’re just reading along with everyone. That’s what this reminds me of, and GM mode is definitely something that I want.
Woods talks about the reaction The New Day initially got from fans, and how that and their personal interests influenced the group:
I think there was a mix. I, myself, enjoy being a bad guy more because it’s way fun for me. But, when we started, we felt like it wouldn’t be well received by the crowd just because it is in an era where if you’re just a good person, people don’t like you for whatever reason. You’re like ‘hey, I saved a bus full of children that was going off of a mountain! And I did well on my test scores!’ [The fans’ reaction is like] ‘oh well you suck! You didn’t have a fall from grace and come back from it! We hate you!’ And it’s like everyone’s just very cynical and horrible now, so we had the idea that that is how we would be received and we were, which essentially worked in our favor because people were like ‘oh, I can’t stand this, I hate it!’ but they were vocal about it. So, being vocal and listening for sounds when we go out, that is what makes wrestling. If people were just silent, that’s the worst thing you could hear. The fact that they were so adamantly against it and hated it so much allowed us to lean into that and create what we created.
And then everything—I’m going to say fell to pieces, but fell to pieces in a good way. Then it just became random things that we enjoy and it stopped being a gimmick. It became us and our personalities. The unicorn horns—if we would have gone up to the higher-ups in the company, ‘we want to come out with the trombone and unicorn horns’, we would’ve gotten thrown out of the office. The evolution of getting there made it make sense. If you were to explain The New Day to a new fan, you can’t do it. The unicorns happened because I legitimately enjoy unicorns; as a kid one of my favorite movies was called ‘The Last Unicorn’. The thing behind that is unicorns bring magic wherever they go, and we don’t have magic anymore because all of the unicorns are gone. We said since we brought magic back that we’re the unicorns of wrestling, and then it literally spiraled out of control. Then we asked for a trombone, because I played a trombone when I was a little kid, and they said yes, and we were like ‘something’s happening here’. I was supposed to hand the trombone off to one of our props guys when we got to the end of the ramp, but I was like ‘you know what? I don’t know if I’m ever going to play the trombone again on live TV’ and I just went, and he’s like ‘OK..’ and I started playing the trombone. We got to the back and they were like ‘Yep! That’s you now!’
It was like things that randomly happened. We had a lumberjack match, but only two guys were in the match because it was a regular tag team match. I’m on the team, but I’m on the floor with the lumberjacks, which makes me ‘Chief’ Lumberjack in charge of all of the lumberjacks. So I was like let me cosplay as a lumberjack, because it’s funny to me, and [Big] E is like ‘oh, well you should probably have pancakes.’ And I was like, ‘you know, you’re right.’ The next week, there was no lumberjack match, there was no lumberjack cosplay, and it was like ‘you want to do pancakes again?’ And we’re like ‘yeah, sure’ and now we’re eight months deep into pancakes because it was funny to us. It’s nothing but chaos, but I think we’ve been successful because it’s our energy and our chemistry as friends.
AJ Styles Reacts To Four Wrestlers Being Ranked Higher Than Him In WWE 2K19 (Video)
AJ Styles is also featured on the show; Woods’ interview begins at the 32:15 mark:
