In a recent interview 98.5 The Sports Hub, WWE NXT superstar DIJAK discussed several topics including his return to the brand, the origins of his character and more.

“It was some time around WrestleMania last year and we were doing the T-BAR stuff and I was on Main Event every week, and it wasn’t what I envisioned for myself as a WWE wrestler, and just toward the tail end of that, I was barely ever on TV, I think in 2022, I was on RAW maybe twice and one of them was a Battle Royal, the other was getting squashed by Omos, so it wasn’t what I wanted out of the WWE. I was happy to have a job, I was happy that they kept me employed, I was happy to be in the ring every week on Main Event in front of a large crowd, working guys who are great like Mustafa Ali, Cedric Alexander, Shelton Benjamin, there was this rotation of guys on the show. Main Event, unfortunately there kind of still is, they’re integrating NXT guys a little bit more, it’s a good spot in some aspects, but it’s not the spot that anybody covets, nobody dreams about being on Main Event for the rest of their career, you know, it’s a good spot to be on a few times, but everybody wants to main event WrestleMania.

It’s a tough spot to be in and I wanted to express that to Mr. McMahon, so I met with him and we had a great conversation, a 20-minute conversation, he asked me about my background, my life and all that stuff and I told him about my legitimate background in criminal justice, I have an undergraduate and graduate degree from Bridgewater State where I played two sports, but I have these graduate degrees in criminal justice, I told him my favorite movies are the movies Seven and Sin City, these sort of crime-based, film-noir dramas and stuff and he collected all this information and the most kind of feedback I got from him was, there’s something about the criminal mind, I like that, there’s something there and I said okay. I agree with that, I never really looked at it from that perspective, I think that’s wonderful, so I drafted this whole character, I gave the notes to the writers, I gave it to him and honestly, not much ever came of it, I don’t know if it sat on the backburner, I don’t know if they wanted to get to it, I don’t know if whatever happened and then there was this bit of a paradigm shift and transition in terms of creative leadership, and I started having conversations more so with Hunter instead of Vince, because he was running the brand that I was on, so I was trying to integrate that, and that’s kind of how this NXT transition started to happen.

As soon as I found that out, I said great, I had this meeting with Shawn Michaels, Matt Bloom and Johnny Russo, I think those were the three in the room, and as soon as I sat down with them, I had the presentation ready, just because I had already done it for Vince and I even filmed an extra vignette that I just talked about where I lighted it and I did the smoke and they looked at it and they said, this is spectacular, and when you hear this is great, we’re going to run with it in WWE, I’ve heard that before and it doesn’t always happen, so I heard them say that and I said okay, I’ve worked with these guys before, they’ve never done me wrong. That being said, this is still WWE, I’m going to take everything with a grain of salt and to their credit, three or four weeks later, they started the backstage stuff and we started filming the vignettes and I said wow, this is pretty much exactly what I pitched and envisioned and they were right on board and we’ve been moving and advancing from that stage ever since, and I could not possibly be happier with the presentation.”

The full interview is available at this link.