The former Peyton Royce is looking to find her love for professional wrestling again.
Cassie Lee, aka Peyton Royce of the IIconics, was a recent guest on Insight with Chris Van Vliet where spoke in-depth about her wrestling career and reigniting her passion for the business. Lee was released by WWE in April, and she says the move stole her love for wrestling but she wants to get it back.
“I don’t feel like I’m done with wrestling. I feel like I have dreams that I especially want to grasp, between being split up from Jess and when we were let go,” she explained. “I still want to chase that.
“I feel like being let go really broke my heart and it kind of for a long time took my love, like it stole my love of wrestling. And I would love to get that back and not move on with my life with this bitter feeling about wrestling, like I still get emotional about it. I decided I wanted to wrestle for WWE when I was ten years old. Literally, every decision I made in my life,” Lee said, “was for the purpose that it would get me one step closer to WWE. And those are things like picking my subjects in high school, like what subjects can I pick that’s going to help me learn things that are going to progress me to WWE.”
Lee said she worried about being cut the year prior, but getting the call this year actually caught her off guard because she’d been working so hard and pushing herself to do more. Despite being surprised by the move, Lee says it might have been a blessing in disguise. Although she was starting out on a singles run as Peyton Royce in WWE, she explained how she was unhappy in the company and was talked out of quitting by one of her peers and fellow Australian, Rhea Ripley.
“I was really unhappy at work. And a few times I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do it anymore, like I think I want to ask for my release.’ And there was times I’d be in the locker room and some sort of creative would change and I was just so upset. And Rhea of all people had to talk me off the ledge,” she revealed, “because I was about to walk into Talent Relations and say like ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I’m so unhappy.’ And she kind of talked me off the ledge, but I was unhappy. So the release I think was a blessing in disguise. I was unhappy and I was so close to asking for my release but I never pulled the trigger.”
Lee and Jessica McKay (Billie Kay) recently spoke with Busted Open Radio and said they plan on sticking together, calling themselves a “package deal.”
“We definitely want to stay together,” said Lee. “We want to move forward together because we’re most comfortable together, and we can play off each other so easily, like we don’t even have to talk about what we’re gonna do. We just go out there, and it just kind of comes naturally to us because we have so much history together. I think when it’s organic like that, it’s better than ‘Here’s your script’ so we definitely want to move forward together.”
Despite those plans, the duo told Renee Paquette they still have to wait to clear up their work visa issues before they can hit the road together.
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