Karrion Kross Recalls Hearing Fans Laughing At Him Wearing Red Helmet

Karrion Kross was recently a guest on The Ringer Wrestling Show, where he recalled wearing the red helmet during his original main roster run in WWE.

"Well, I don't know if I've ever said this publicly, but the first time I came out with the mask, there were people laughing in the audience. They were laughing. I always remembered getting into this business and thinking to myself, 'When this is all said and done, I want to leave this place a better place than it was before I came in.' You want to make it better. You want to make people around you better. You want to make the product better, you want your performances to get better. For me, I'm always chasing the perfect match. That's my wrestling philosophy. I'm chasing the perfect story and I just always wanted to contribute my best foot forward, artistically, and be work-driven.

"When I came out with that, and I heard people laughing, I was like, You know 'What I'm doing right now,' to me at the time, it felt like I was betraying everything that I wanted to contribute to what I was doing and [betraying the] fans, because the fan in me is still alive. That's how I know how to read an audience. If you become too high up on your horse, and you disconnect from them, 'I'll tell them what they're gonna like.' That's not that's never gonna work. So the difference between then and now is tonight, I walked out and they were singing our theme music. The entire audience was singing our theme music. That was a moment we wanted to get to before the pandemic and I got that tonight in a packed house in Philadelphia. So that was incredible. So I would say that that is the major difference between last time and tonight."

On if he still has the mask:

"I just left it in the props truck. I didn't hate it, honestly. I just thought that for continuity purposes, it didn't make any sense, and that's why people couldn't get into it," he said. "We carved out a very specific supervillain in the first rendition of Karrion Kross in NXT. This is a guy who's completely morbidly obsessed with time and everything revolving around stopwatches and hourglasses and this metaphoric, impending doom, he's going to take time off your life, and now he's coming out with no context, without his partner in crime, and a new outfit, and an amputated presentation. So it just pulled people out.

"If you're watching Game of Thrones, and suddenly, one of the characters was played by somebody else with no explanation, or he's just dressed differently or has a new accent or something, it takes you out of the narrative of the story. I feel like that's what happened. I didn't think that the character presentation was a bad idea, but just the way it was introduced. It just didn't make any sense. So people were going, 'This is not what we wanted.'"