Kross went on to talk through his hitman-esque persona on the independent scene. With the lower budget of indie wrestling, he noted that he couldn’t and didn’t rely on presentation, but rather used mic time to sell tickets to his target audience. He specifically named wrestlers such as Taz, Toshiaki Kawada, Gary Albright, and Steve Williams as inspirations.

Kross contrasted that with also drawing inspiration from Rick Rude and Gangrel on the theatrics side, which would come up for him when going to WWE. “When I went to WWE I knew with it being a story-based company that coming in as a shoot fighter, wrestler type thing wasn’t going to cut it, so I really began to lean in and embrace their process of creating a larger-than-life type character.”

“I had several conversations with Hunter about it to just explore what we could do with that,” Kross said, “I wanted, most importantly, his feedback on my ideas because they’re the billionaires, I’m the guy wrestling on the Indies. I said, ‘Here are my concepts, if we put this on a world stage what do you think about it?’ I just kind of kept my ring style, hoping to be able to appease both types of fans. Fans that are looking for that and then fans that are looking for the classic larger-than-life type of character.”

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit “The Undisputed Podcast” with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.