In a recent interview with Renee Paquette as part of The Sessions podcast, All Elite Wrestling referee Aubrey Edwards discussed several topics, including her WWE tryout prior to AEW’s formation, criticism from people of her refereeing style and more.

Highlights of the interview are below:

On her WWE tryout: “It was terrifying, so the way my tryouts were worked was it was like four separate times, I think a total of say, 16 days, so I was brought out and they told me up front, like we’re looking for more referees for the Mae Young Classic, so I knew that was sort of the carrot that I was working towards. They brought me out in I think it was either June or July for a whole week, they just said we want to see you in a class structure, we want to see you working with the other reps, we want to give you the full referee experience, so they’d reached out to me partly because Jessika Carr, who’s a referee now on SmackDown, we knew each other from talking on Twitter or whatever, so she had given my name as another potential female referee, so I came in and that week, DDP was at the Performance Center and they’re just like, we’re going to do yoga every day and I’m like, I am going to nail this, because I’ve been doing yoga since I was 12. There was a push-up contest at one point where you do a five count down, hold for five count, come back up and if you fall or delay, you’re out and I was like, I’ve got this and the only people that beat me were Lacey Evans and Shayna Baszler, I was like I did okay, I’m okay with this. That was the same week that they were filming NXT, so I got to do a dark match before their TV tapings, also in-between commercials and stuff, I got to run out and help talent after matches and whatnot. It was just a really cool experience to see the whole thing and what a day in the life of a referee was. Then, once I was done with that week, they messaged me and said we want to bring you in for the Mae Young Classic, it’s going to be a full week in August, so I go out and I’m just doing the same thing, like trying to just keep to myself, but be helpful where I can and they gave me a ton of matches, that was the first time that I met Toni Storm and I think she had like four matches that same day.”

On the criticism of her refereeing and how she’s trying to be a character in the ring: “I think when it first started happening, it was obviously something that I’m just like, oh Twitter eventually is going to hate me, because I’m a woman, so that’s going to just happen and I’m really good about not listening to criticism that doesn’t matter, I listen to constructive criticism, that’s sort of where I’ve been focused. If Jericho is putting me in a match and he’s shoving me and then wants me to shove him back, I’m going to do it, because it’s ultimately not my decision, it’s his decision, because it’s his story and I’m there to help elevate the story that he’s telling, so it’s not like I tried to be a character, it was just sort of like, they figured out that I have a very go-getter personality and very no-nonsense, and as people picked me in matches, they’re like, oh well if I shove her, I get a lot of heat for that, so let’s do that, cool, great, and it just sort of happened naturally, but it was never something I intended, it was just something that happened because the wrestlers asked me to do things in matches and I do them.”

The full interview is available at this link.