By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Peter Avalon
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
Video available at Chris Van Vliet’s YouTube Page
On still being in AEW:
“You can see me and [Ryan] Nemeth and the rest of the wingmen, Cezar and JD, we are usually main-eventing Dark. Weird how it works out where people wonder where we are at, we are not on the flyers or any of the advertising. Hell, it’s hard, they don’t even post any of our pictures on Green Fly. But it’s funny that we will main event most episodes of Dark and we are now 0 and 672 to The Dark Order and to The Best Friends. We are doing really well against both teams.”
On Peter Avalon doing acting:
“I’m trying to do more and more. I just got myself a little commercial agent and I am working on getting myself some more agents. I just did a film and a music video with Jacob Sartorius. He is a very talented young man and he is big on Tik Tok, millions of followers. I am just trying to stay busy while also still wrestling. I am still with AEW, [also] booking, writing and appearing on Championship Wrestling, which we do every month at the Irvine Improv. Then I am doing GCW with my man Ray Rosa, Prestige Wrestling, we have Epic Pro Wrestling coming up. There is a lot of stuff, I am very active, very busy and a lot of fun.”
On the fans’ reaction when Peter Avalon said he was taking bookings:
“But it means that I am still there, I am doing more things and there is more to life than Dynamite and Rampage. I’ve been in Dynamite since day one, and they are doing their thing so I am going to do my thing.”
On multiple stars in AEW taking other bookings:
“It’s beautiful for Tony to let us do that and expand our horizons while still being able to work at AEW. It’s great, shoutout to Tony for that.”
On Peter Avalon’s initial name:
“I wanted to be Prince Peter Avalon. I wanted to write myself as a Spaniard prince and put a little italic over one of them. It was a little idea I had for Hollywood that I never ran with.”
On possibly teaming with Aaron Stevens in Championship Wrestling from Hollywood:
“Funny you should say that. He was writing the show before I took over. So that’s fun. We are both handsome and stunning.”
On The Librarian gimmick:
“That is all Tony, it’s Tony Khan’s idea. I had Cody when he was there and it was when AEW was still an idea that people were talking about. I had a DM from him after working at Championship Wrestling. He DM’d me saying ‘Hey. Hold whatever date in May.’ It ended up being the first Double or Nothing. May 25th, hold that date. So I said OK. So at a bar wrestling show at The Bootleg we are downstairs and I think The Bucks came, Chris Daniels maybe, Scorpio Sky was booked. And they all just started telling me this idea about The Librarian, and it was Tony’s idea. After then explaining it to me and after Tony explained the idea, we thought that the only person that could get this over and play this well is Peter Avalon. I said oh thank you. So they explained the idea and they explained this and they filmed a bit for BTE and then it was kind of off to the races. They would still kind of describe what the character was going to be as time went on. So the idea that Tony wanted was that he wanted a librarian, it was a character that got heat by saying shush to everyone, I work at the library. And that was pretty much the gist of the idea. The Bucks wanted to do a take on it where I am Peter Avalon and I am going to take this dumb part because I want my foot in the company by any means necessary. So we are kind of acknowledging that this gimmick is dumb but I am going to do it because I want the job. We then kind of played it like that on BTE. Ultimately I just kind of became a librarian and started to believe it. Then the team with Brandon happened and then the split happened.”
On Leva Bates being The Librarian as well:
“That was also just kind of done on the fly. I was under the idea that I was going to be the only librarian. I was under the idea that I was going to be The Librarian on BTE, and then they did this thing where there was going to be a contest where people could send in promos to become The Librarian. They kind of told me that it was going to happen and that they had an idea for 2 librarians. I am like hey whatever, I’m down for whatever. I am professional Peter Avalon and I can make anything work. Especially anything silly. So whatever, these promos happen and Leva’s naturally gains traction, she is good at what she does, she is a natural entertainer and she is good. So now she wins the contest and we are partnered together and here we are today. It was kind of written as we went on, and it was a lot of my own brainchild of trying to think of what to say. Tony wanted it to be very Lanny Poffo, but I didn’t just want to be a direct Lanny Poffo. Maybe I won’t do poetry, let me dive in and actually see what a librarian actually does. I know he is not someone who just reads books, a librarian just doesn’t read books, he is Google before Google. You go and talk to him and you can find out information or he can point you in the right direction. So that’s what I will do, I will spit facts. So maybe I will find some sports facts and start reciting some facts. So that became my fame for a little bit as I come out and try to take the little jabs at the sports teams. I had Jenn Sterger there at the time, she was my clue in to anything that was sports related. She knew her stuff man. I would be like ‘OK, where are we at? What team?’ And she was hammering off like current stuff like ‘This guy is this, this guy is injured…’ I’m like sh*t I don’t know any of this stuff. I don’t give a sh*t I am not an NFL or an NBA guy. So she helped my big time with those promos.”
On the crowd loving to shush:
“They did, I still get shushed. My match with Sonny Kiss at Fight For the Fallen was the first time that I got to actually wrestle as The Librarian. I just remember, and again, everything was just done on the fly. Nothing has been hammered out, I am getting my reps in on air as The Librarian and what this character is. I have nothing written down. So this is kind of before I started doing the shush schtick before I started walking down to the ring. So now I have no idea what I am going to do as The Librarian, transitioning from Professional Peter at the Hollywood show, then being Producer Peter at my Arizona show, those are 2 separate characters. Then I was still doing the stripping PPRay act, which is a completely separate character. So now I have a fourth character that I have to develop and I don’t know what it is. So I come out to just silence. I have the mic, they wanted me to say something to get to Sonny’s entrance, and I am getting booed the entire way down. I am like hell yeah this is awesome, this feels good. They are booing the hell out of me and I didn’t have the music, they just had the Titantron that said ‘Quiet in the library.’ Me and Leva just paused at the top of the ramp and continued down. Boos, heavy boos, I’m like yes this is great, this is working. I get in the ring, look at the hard cam and give them one lone shhh. And they are then booing the hell out of me and I am like this is great, this feels so good. Me and Sonny have a nice little 5 minute match. I think it was a good pre-match, we didn’t overstay our welcome. But Sonny comes out with a little song and dance number, fun little match, Sonny wins, we go home. Everyone is awake and goes into the pay-per-view excited, which is the point of a pre-match. Then when I got to the back, Tony was ecstatic, he was so stoked. He was behind the desk going ‘Peter that was great! Peter Avalon Championship Wrestling from F’in Hollywood! My man, that was wonderful. Hell yeah, great job great job!’ He’s telling me how great I did and he is putting over Championship Wrestling, hey thanks for watching. He was so stoked that it went so well, and I was so stoked that it went so well. It just had a natural, people had the natural inclination to boo this. ‘Don’t tell me to be quiet.’ And they did [boo me] and it was great.”
On Chad Gable also shushing people:
“I got quite a few [texts]. I would get tagged on social media. I’m like what is this and then it’s like ohh. [Puts thumb up] Good for you Chad. [Chris mentions Peter Avalon did it first] That’s right, I’m the shush man.”
On who helped Peter Avalon get his foot in the door at AEW:
“It was a bunch of people. I am a one-of-a-kind character in professional wrestling. I can play one-of-a-kind characters. It is great that people can practice their characters for so long, but I can play it with nothing, just give it to me. Like The Librarian, there was nothing given to me and I made it completely unique, so I am a one-of-a-kind character. So it was Cody, it was The Bucks, most of the EVPs sans Kenny, he was the only one I hadn’t met. I met The Bucks in 2007, I was training at a school in Anaheim. Charles Mercury was the trainer, he is an old PWG guy. Scorpio Sky was one of my trainers, he would come through. And since they were pals with all the guys in the area, The Bucks were still coming up from time to time. They came around to roll in the ring, we also had Chris Hero, Candice LeRae, a lot of people would come through. That was how I met The Bucks, they would come through training once or twice and I rolled around with them. They were like ‘This kid is talented and he wants it.’ I got to meet them for the first time and saw them wrestle at AWS nearby, this is when they were Slick Nick Jackson and Instant Replay Matt Jackson, freshly called The Young Bucks not too long ago. This was before they started working PWG too. I was at their first PWG match and I was excited for them because of the training that I had with them. Hell yeah, my pals are wrestling at Guerrilla. I want to say it was Scott Lost and Chris Bosh. I am happy that they thought of me, it is one thing to say that my pals got me in, but an idea came and they all clicked in unison, Peter Avalon, immediately Peter Avalon. Yeah I had that way in, but all of their brains went into one direction.”
On call The Gunn Club “Ass Boys” before Danhausen did:
“Yeah, like way before. Me and Shawn Spears wrestled against Austin and Billy, Colten wasn’t there yet. Me being The Librarian, I got to talk on the mic, I can’t remember what I said exactly. But it was something like ‘Billy. Billy Gunn and son. What does that make you? The Ass Boy?’ There was Ass Boy chants going on and everything, it was fun. It was on Dark and it is on my Twitter. It’s alright, my cheque will come.”
On dream matches:
“Oh there are so many. Christian Cage, Ethan Page, Brian Cage, DDP. I would have loved to have wrestled Brian Cage when he was the TV champ, but who wouldn’t want to?”
On Peter Avalon’s time in TNA:
“I loved working with Ethan Carter, EC3, he is great. He was very helpful with me, he knew what the role was, I’m there to get my ass whooped. But he wanted me to come out of it really well and he knows I’m not supposed to come out of it well. This is all for him, but he wanted to make sure that I got as much mileage as I could out of it. I think because of that, I was able to get 6 months out of it in 2013 as Norv Fernum. Jeff Jarret was the producer of most of our stuff and was behind it. But when he left, they were not as gung ho and eventually we just stopped getting used.”
On possibly competing in a deathmatch:
“That goes through my mind a lot. I think it would have to be a lot of money behind it. Seeing Pretty Peter in a deathmatch, there would have to be a big cheque for me to do it.”
On training David Arquette:
“I was the head trainer at the United Wrestling Wrestle Center that is in Oxnard when the Championship Wrestling show was filmed out there every month. I was recommended to David and then I got a phone call. I think I had a private that day, so I didn’t answer the phone until after I was done. I checked my phone, got a voicemail and I thought it was a rib. So I called him back, set up a time and he came down to Oxnard. I think he came down 2 or 3 times, the first time I made his ass puke! It was hard and it was hot in my school, the rolls make you dizzy. He then bought a ring and set it up in his backyard, so I would go to his house and train every week in his backyard.”
Sorry, who is this person?