Jon Moxley was recently interviewed by Andrew Grevas of 25 Years Later. During the interview, the former Dean Ambrose spoke on a wide variety of topics about his exit from WWE.
One of the most interesting parts was when he spoke about working with Vince McMahon and Dusty Rhodes. Moxley shared the difference between how Vince and Dusty viewed his character in WWE.
Here is what he said:
I was privileged enough to be able to work for Vince McMahon and also work with Dusty Rhodes, who was the head of creative at FCW when I was there. I had a very great and fulfilling time there. I would sit in the office with Dusty in the afternoons and just shoot the shit, in between training sessions. We would talk creative and ideas and he was still able at that point in his life to get excited about an idea just the same way he did at his apex in the late ’80s. I was privileged enough to work for arguably the two biggest creative driving forces in our industry. I’ll never get to main event WrestleMania but I got to main event Starrcade in my hometown of Cincinnati and that’s right up there, the top for me. Even though it was WWE’s version, still, it was my hometown and Dusty created Starrcade.
I didn’t look at Dusty as a mentor. There are no peers to Dusty Rhodes but he treated me like one. He had this vision of me, of how I was going to take over WWE. These vignettes would be in a smokey bar, the camera zooms in on my back, Dean Ambrose leather jacket, in the Viper Club. He called it the Viper Club but he meant the Viper Room. He had this vision of me as a Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, “you’re James Dean baby”. He literally saw me as the coolest person in the world; that’s how he pictured these vignettes and pitched them to me. Dusty saw me as the coolest person in the world and Vince saw me as an idiot. That’s the difference between the two.
On a related note, check out the original plans for the ending of Summerslam 2018 according to Moxley.