By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Sonya Deville
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On whether she has retired from wrestling: “Definitely for now. Never say never. But right now I feel at peace with that. I’m not gonna lie, and I haven’t said this, but it almost is like an open wound, and if I think about wrestling somewhere else, it’s like I was so loyal to the company, it was my only home from 21 years old to 31. I’m a ride or die type of person in general. So it’s weird to even think about doing that, but not there.”
On neither she nor Mandy Rose liking their SummerSlam match: “Yeah, it’s not my favorite match. It pisses me off still, because it’s my favorite storyline I’ve ever been a part of, and I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done with promo and character work and even the whole lead-up. But yeah, we were a f*cking mess. Not to make excuses, but the attempted kidnapping happened two nights before SummerSlam. Vince wanted to scrap the match on our behalf. I told him absolutely not, we worked this hard, and this motherf*cker is not gonna ruin our moment. So we scrapped the hair versus hair because I had to go to court and testify the next day and I was like, I’m probably not in the right frame of mind to be bald right now during all this, there was too much to process. He agreed. And he was like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I was like, I don’t know. I got to think of something equally as high-stakes, another stipulation.
“So I came up with the loser leaves town. So we get to work that day, and the producers come up to us, and they’re like, ‘Okay, it’s now a loser leaves town match, but Daria is going to go over.’ And it’s weird, because the producer and Mandy felt like that wasn’t the right move, because Mandy was supposed to be the babyface coming out of this. I was obviously the heel, and I had been kind of kicking her ass the whole angle, so I agreed with them. So I actually went to Vince and Bruce and got the ending changed. I said, ‘Sir, I think Mandy should win, because I have a way to get me back from a loser leaves much better than we could get Mandy back. Why don’t I come back as like a schizophrenic the next week? And you’re trying to tell me that I don’t work here anymore, and I lost, but I’m under the impression that I’m somebody else, and we go with this whole angle.’ Vince’s exact words were, ‘I f*cking love it! God damn it. You can be hanging from my chandelier in the office, swinging around.’ And I was like, Okay!
“I didn’t see it like that. I didn’t see me hanging from your chandelier, but sure, and so we were on the same page. It was all good. Mandy was gonna get her comeuppance. I was gonna get an amazing character arc out of it, and all was gonna be well. And then the loser leaves happens, and I’m not needed for TVs, like, one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, a month, two months, like, all this time’s going by, and I’m texting Bruce from texting Vince. I’m like, ‘Hey guys, what’s the deal? I thought I was coming back right after. It’s the only reason I agreed to lose was because we had this cool angle to come back and bring me back.’ They were like, ‘Oh, just, just stay tight. Hang tight.’ Then all of a sudden, finally, Bruce says, ‘You know, after a second thought, when we do a loser leaves, we have to honor the stipulation, so you have to stay gone for a while.’ I was like, ‘Oh, why didn’t you tell me that when we discussed this? I would have much rather have won.’
“I don’t have many regrets in life, but booking myself to lose that match is probably my only one. And it was like a running joke when I came back in the writers’ room with the head writers, they kind of busted my chops and were like, ‘Remember that time you booked yourself to lose a match that when we were trying to push you?’ So much you don’t know behind the scenes, because you’re not having these conversations like, ‘Hey, when you win this one, we’re going to push you, and we want Mandy to go in a different direction. You’re going to go in a different direction.’ So it wasn’t that transparent. So I didn’t really know what I was doing to myself at the time. So I ended up sitting home for five months. Then I come back, I go into Vince’s office, I’m like, ‘Hey, sir, what are we doing? Like, what do we do now?’
“He’s like, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I have these really cool suits in my hotel room, and I think it’d be cool to have a boss vibe to me.’ He kind of looked at me and was like, ‘Where are the suits?’ And I was like, they’re my hotel room. He’s like, send a runner to go get them. I was like, Okay, what the f*ck is going on? He didn’t tell me anything. He’s like, ‘You’re gonna walk down the hallway in a suit and superstars lined on both sides, and they’re gonna be clapping for you.’ And you just walked down. And I’m like, and then what? ‘That’s it.’ Okay? So I put my suit on, getting hair and makeup, and if you go watch it back, my return was I walked down the hallway in a suit with superstars lined on both sides, and then that slowly evolved into the GM character with Pearce.”
On working with Adam Pearce: “I had so many crazy pitches for that character. Vince would always say, we’re not booking Adam Pearce vs. Sonya Deville at WrestleMania. Because I always wanted to push the limit with Adam, but there was no payoff for him. He couldn’t get a comeback, so we couldn’t go too far with it, but I did get to slap him that one time. He’s tough. He was, like, lay it in. I was like, Okay, careful what you asked for.”
On not revisiting her partnership with Chelsea Green: “They just didn’t want to go back to it. They didn’t want to go back to it. I had pitched that it would be a natural angle to go after Piper and be like, ‘What the hell? Bitch, that’s my f*cking championship!’ Very natural angle. But they had this idea for this faction, and so that was where we were gonna go. I will say, while I was out, I did pitch coming back in my MMA gimmick, like a modified version, but I did pitch going back to my roots, and I think Triple H had the same kind of idea. He was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Let’s do this group.’ When he told me the group, I was like, Okay, interesting. I didn’t know how the three of us were going to blend together, me, Zoe, and Shayna, in PFC. So I was open-minded to it, and of course, whatever he wants. I saw myself more as the mouthpiece in that scenario, and I was like, okay, but we couldn’t get our footing. And then we were given the name Pure Fusion Collective, and I thought that was terrible. I don’t think it was ever going to be the thing, but we tried to make it work.”
I mean fair play to Sonya if thats how she feels. But at 31 to be so loyal to a place that didnt see any value in you and never work elsewhere out of loyalty to that place is honorable, but moreso sad really.
Plenty of other places to work, show your value and one day get back to that place if thats the goal.