Peyton Royce credited her husband Shawn Spears for her character in NXT.
The former WWE Women’s Tag Team Champion started out in NXT with a Poison Ivy-inspired character, which helped immediately get her over in front of the Full Sail crowd alongside fellow The IIconics teammate Billie Kay.
At first, Royce struggled to find her sense of self in her WWE character. It was never something she focused on before being signed, but her now-husband saw the similarities between her and the Batman villain, and helped her create the “Venus Fly Trap” character.
Peyton Royce discussed this on Ring the Belle. She revealed that her background as a dancer and love for plants inspired the gimmick.
“I had a lot of help from my husband [Shawn Spears]. They were talking to us a lot about who you want to present yourself as. This is the first time this question has ever been posed to me before. Because prior to NXT, I had all my time on the Indies. Back then at least, there was not much emphasis put on ‘Who are you?’. It was just like, ‘How do you wrestle?’ kind of thing.”
“It would stump me a lot, but my husband helped me.” Peyton Royce continued. “My now-husband helped me so much with it. I was a dancer. I grew up a dancer, so I kind of had this way of moving. It reminded him of Poison Ivy. And then, I love flowers and plants—like, I’m a bit weird like that. So, we were like, ‘Okay, Poison Ivy, we’re thinking greens and purples,’ and like, ‘Okay, Venus fly trap—that could be such a cool concept.’ And so, I kind of just blended the two, and then we kept on working through it from there.”
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