Ahead of tonight’s AEW Full Gear pay-per-view, Chris Jericho interviewed Lee Moriarty on Talk Is Jericho.
Moriarty said he didn’t know it was MJF winning the poker chip at All Out until MJF came down to actually get it:
“It was a very well kept secret. I didn’t know it was MJF until that night. So the way it started was, I was with Matt Sydal and Dante Martin in kind of a group. Tony Khan pulled me aside in a locker room. He asked me a question. He said, ‘Would you be comfortable dyeing your hair?’ He didn’t explain why or anything like that. He just said, ‘It’ll come with a big push and things like that. More opportunities.’ So I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m cool with it.’ My trainers taught me like, take something that they give to you and just make the most of it. Like, it’s hair. It’ll grow back in the future. That happened. They didn’t really tell me exactly what, they just said it was going to be a group. Stokely told me it’s going to be a big thing and I trusted everyone who told me about it. I trusted Tony. I trusted QT. I trusted Stokley. I took that business card back in July, disappeared for a month, came back, and then, you know, did the poker chip. I didn’t know it was MJF until afterwards. So after he got the poker chip and walked off, we went back to his trailer and we found out, but it was a really well kept secret.”
On if the other guys in the match knew MJF was coming down:
“As far as I know, they didn’t know too much. They didn’t know it was MJF. They just knew hey, someone’s coming down and getting that poker chip, but they were kind of surprised, too.”
Moriarty said he is a graphics designer outside of wrestling:
“Outside of the ring, I am a graphic designer. So if you watch my entrance before The Firm, that tiger that shows up on the screen, I designed that. That’s my logo. I have a little check mark. It’s a flame mark. It’s my icon logo. I have all these knowledgeable things about business and branding from being a graphic designer. My first T-shirt in AEW, I designed. My wrestling gear, I designed. My mask, I designed. My new boxing robe I’m going to be coming out with soon, I designed. I want to leave my imprint on so many things in professional wrestling and outside of wrestling too. I’ve done illustrations for a wrestling book. I don’t think it’s come out yet, but that is something I’ve done. There’s an artist, Open Mike Eagle. He had a music video premiere on Adult Swim. I did a graphic that showed up on that. There’s like a lot of stuff I’ve done as a graphic designer. I’m very proud of that. Something I want to get involved in professional wrestling once I’m done with the in-ring stuff is the visual presentation of something, because I think wrestling, for the most part, was always like, it looked this certain way or felt this certain way because this is what worked. So I want to figure out how to change things to look a little bit differently to appeal to more people like myself.”
Click below for the full interview.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Talk Is Jericho with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
