By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
“Andrew Thompson Interviews” with guest Joe Hendry
Host: Andrew Thompson
Full interview available at YouTube.com and PostWrestling.com
The interview was conducted at the ROH Free Enterprise event in February.
Hendry talks staying in contact with Kurt Angle: “Yeah we’ve spoken a few times. Quite a few times, and the thing is, I look up to Kurt in a huge way, and he was a great person to talk to about advice and creative advice and someone who’s really been there and done it at the highest level in both amateur and professional wrestling. So, he was great for advice in both those realms, and I’ve really used a lot of the advice he gave to me and he’s a very giving performer. He’s very focused on what he can do to help the next wave of talent so that showed to me how top talent should carry themselves and how they should conduct themselves. He’s just a classy individual.”
On Drew McIntyre’s recent success in WWE: “Well, Drew’s probably… he might be the person who taught me the most by wrestling them. Again, Kurt is probably — because I wrestled Drew many times. I also got to wrestle Kurt once, but I feel like Drew really forced me to up my game, up my intensity level and trust myself to be more than just a comedy act basically, so, I think Drew really pushed me to do that. Drew is a great guy, a locker room leader and a super hard worker and you know, what he’s doing is quite inspirational and I’m inspired by that. I want to… I wish him the best and like I said, he’s doing his thing there, I’m doing my thing here and it’s a great time for Scottish wrestling.”
Hendry on feeling respected in ROH/having creative freedom: “Well, I think the parodies are the things that get the most response but in terms of the entrance music, the cool entrance music, this is by far the best one [Wave Your Hands], and I just kind of deconstructed it and I really thought, ‘At what point am I gonna be doing this thing? At what point am I gonna be standing on the stage? When am I gonna be in the ring? When am I gonna wave my hands?’ And I was like — I really took it back to basics and I was like, ‘What do I want the audience to do? I want them to interact’ so I put the couple of claps and then I was like, ‘Then I want them to wave their hands, then I wanna be standing this way’ so I really, really enjoy the creative process of reverse engineering an entrance and again, being in Ring of Honor, they gave me the creative freedom to do that, and that’s the amazing thing about working for this company is we didn’t have to go through loads of different channels or red tape and all that. They were just like, ‘Do you want us to do your music or do you got this?’ And I was like, ‘I got this’ and they were like, ‘Cool. Get it to us by this date’ and that was it. They just trusted me to do my thing and I really respected that and I feel very respected working here as a talent. I feel respected as an individual and it’s a great place to work. I can’t speak highly enough about it. When people ask me about it, I always tell them, ‘It’s what I thought the dream would be.'”
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