Lana was recently a guest on the 411 Wrestling Interviews Podcast. During the podcast, she spoke about WWE dropping her Russian accent.
On if it was hard for her to talk with a Russian accent and fans getting irritated by it near the end:
“I just had to talk slower, I talk really, really fast. So I think it’s sometimes harder for me to talk with no accent, because I talk really fast. And then I listen to myself back and I’m like ‘Woah, I need to slow down!’ So when I was doing the whole Russian accent, that wasn’t hard. Once I got into that mindset, I grew up around Russians, I grew up around people with accents, so it was just like I just talked like that all the time.
I felt like, it was, sometimes when I talk without an accent, I talk fast, and I have to remind myself, really fast, I talk really fast in real life, and I have to remind myself to slow down. So, that is a little bit of a challenge. I think a little bit of the challenge more was probably last year, I was told they wanted to me to lessen my accent, lessen, lessen, lessen my accent until I had no accent, so I kept on doing that.
I think, it just would get a little irritating, not even irritating because you can’t get irritated, but with the WWE Universe that they would be like ‘Ugh, she’s going in and out of the accent.’ It’s like, ‘No, I’m not going in and out of the accent, I’m purposefully talking with less of an accent.’ It’s like, no, everything I do is on purpose so calm down.”
On why WWE didn’t address the accent change on TV and when WWE made the decision to drop it:
“Well, you’re asking me questions way above my pay grade. If they want to call the Chairman and ask him that, he might know. Whose to say, but, no, look, this is WWE. Everything is situational, everything changes minutely. We sometimes find out what we’re doing 30 minutes before we go live. We just do, after you’ve been, I don’t ask a lot of questions. My job is to execute whatever they want to the best of my ability. This isn’t, people think, we’re characters at the end of the day, it’s like a movie, a TV show, it is a TV show. You just do, if that’s what they want, like I said earlier, what we were talking before, it’s two hours, you only have so much to explain on a two hour TV show. RAW has a lot more time, three hours, it really does make a difference, that extra hour. So they told me, it was probably about this time last year, they wanted me to lessen my accent to eventually have no accent, so I said ‘OK’. They never gave any explanation. I think we were turning good guy, maybe they thought the Russian thing sounded harsher? I don’t know, I really don’t know.
I just do what I’m told. I’m like ‘OK, great.” Maybe next week I’ll have an accent again, you just never know. I like to keep everyone on my toes. Maybe everything I’m saying right now is not even true, you never know. That’s the thing about Lana, I like to keep you guys guessing.”
In other news, check out the latest hint on Aiden English’s future with WWE.