On The Relationship With His Father & How It Affected The Aleister Black Character:
I was 13 years old when my dad got a complete emotional breakdown. My dad had a very interesting and very tricky childhood and he carried that into our family life and my dad got into depression for five years. Growing up for me, my dad was the Terminator. A lot of fear came from my dad and my dad never meant to, that’s first and foremost. It was very difficult and I get that, but once I understood why he was the way he was and I say was because he’s no longer that way: it started getting better. Once I understood the dynamics of what made my dad work the way he did and the anger issues that my father dealt with and for some reason it got easier for me and my dad did a 180 and became a completely different person. I often reference my dad as my best friend and my worst enemy. I love my dad very much and he is a fantastic human being, but it took him awhile to get there, which is OK. He got there. My dad is a lovable, social, funny, intelligent, smart, creative guy. He was just dealt a really bad bucket growing up and I think having kids kind of put him face to face with that, especially when we got older and got more emotional. My dad couldn’t handle it because my dad was brought up to not feel. My dad was brought up in a manner which I don’t feel comfortable talking about, but he grew up in a manner where he was told for a long period of time, ‘Men are here to work; women are here to give birth. That’s it. Men don’t cry. Men don’t hug. Men are not involved.’ He was programmed to do one thing. He already rebelled against that system. He ran away from home when he was 15 because he couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t deal with what his parent’s wanted. I often say my character has references to the devil and it’s more in the sense of paradise lost where you see everything from the perspective of the devil and there’s a poem…the baseline of the poem is when the devil fell from earth, what did he do? Did he create a new kingdom of fire and brimstone? Did he rebel against paradise? Did he become evil? Did he do all these things? Yes, but the first thing he did was cry because he lost his dad and a lot of people forget that there’s a redeeming quality. There’s a story and I find the story behind all these things very interesting and I feel Aleister Black is a certain way because of how I went through life and I implemented that into my character. There’s something tragic about Aleister Black. There was something tragic about Tommy End, but Tommy End was more, ‘F the system and I’m fighting against the system,’ but not necessarily mature enough to understand why he was fighting the system. Aleister Black understands why he fights the system and I base that off how my dad grew up and I base that off referencing the devil in the sense of we all see him as this evil guy, ‘My God he does this and all that,’ but he was someone’s son at one point.
On Religion & Christianity [Black Is A Practicing Satanist]:
There’s people that will practice their religion and then there’s Google Christians, as I call them. Google Christians will find anything on the internet that fits their needs that they can throw at you and tell you that you’re a bad person, which is very contradicting because the lessons of Jesus Christ were not to judge anyone. That’s somewhere in the Bible – and don’t quote me – where you should not preach as they preach in the synagogues and on the streets, basically saying you can’t tell people how to apply their religion, you can’t judge people. There’s people who use their religion for comfort….I’m not a religious man, myself, at all.
I was very conflicted when it came to religion when it was younger. I was raised religious, but I never questioned it. I was 15 when I questioned it. It made no sense to me. This, to me, does not feel like a loving God and the more I started developing those kind of thoughts and started reading about it, the more it made no sense to me. I’m very skeptical. It became less tangible for me to have this thing called religion. I felt like a hypocrite for saying I was religious because I was not religious. I was 16 and I said, ‘If God made us, then if I don’t believe in God and I pass then he won’t judge me for it because he meant for me to be this way.’ And nothing ever happened and with everything that ever happened in the world this can’t be someone who watches over us. The longer I thought about it – and this is with all due respect to people who are religious, this is just my personal view – for me it sounded absurd at one point where people used religion to get away with whatever they wanted to get away with and it became an excuse more than it became a peaceful crusade. It became an excuse to do bad things because people felt so self righteous calling out things in the name of their God. The problem is no one questions it.
There are so many world religions and each and every person that has religion feels that their God is just and their story is right. Each and every person that worships a set God feels that their God is gonna be there for them at their passing or in their life and I find that whole behavior fascinating because I don’t have that. I don’t understand that. I don’t feel that way. If there’s one specific God, how can there be so many other ones? There are religions that are way older than Christianity and go back way further than Christianity. Even Greek mythology, they call that mythology now, but way back in the day it wasn’t called mythology. Norwegian mythology, we call it mythology. This was an actual belief system we had; but, now we look at it as a mythology. Maybe in 200-300 years, we’ll look back and say, ‘This is what people believed back then. This is called the Christian mythology.
On Wrestling & Winning The NXT Championship:
This is life. This is all I ever wanted to do…….I wanted to make that victory [NXT Championship] about people with mental problems. I wanted people to know that no matter how far you’re sinking, you could still swim up. Did it make things easier? No. It made me very happy when it happened, but my brain went right into, ‘You’ve got to go to work even harder than you did before.’ I’m never content and that’s sometimes good and that’s sometimes very bad. It’s a big reason why the anxiety is there. I feel like I’m never good enough. I feel like I’m never doing enough. I feel like I’m never chipping in enough. I feel like every single day people around me that compliment me can atone for that because I will immediately backfire the compliment. I can’t take a compliment. If someone says, ‘Hey man, you did a real good job,’ I’m like, ‘No, I could do better.’ I have this need to always self improve where sometimes it becomes toxic….I will hammer myself down for the one thing I did wrong than for the 50 things that I did fantastic. It’s terrible.
On Whether He Wants To Transition To RAW & SmackDown Soon:
No. I want it to be what it needs to be. If I need to go up, then I’ll go up. If they’re like, ‘We want you to stay here for awhile,’ then I’ll stay here for awhile. I want it to be the best that I can [wherever I am].
Readers may listen to Aleister Black’s appearance on Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia in its entirety below:
