Will Ospreay says he has not needed to chase five-star matches this year, and that he does not build them that way in the first place.
Ospreay now has 57 matches rated five stars or better by Dave Meltzer, up from 47 at the start of last year and 25 when he last sat down with Chris Van Vliet in 2023. Nobody else is close. Asked on Insight whether that creates pressure to clear the bar every time, he said the job has been different lately.
“I feel like a lot of this year I haven’t needed to be the five-star guy. I’ve needed to be a little bit of a storyteller guy, and then when it’s time for me to do the five stars, I bust it out,” Ospreay said.
He said he does not aim at the rating.
“I don’t angle my matches towards trying to get a five-star, but I have an idea of what my version of a five-star match looks like,” he said.
Asked what that is, Ospreay said it depends entirely on what came before the bell, and pointed at a match that needed none of it.
“You look at the Dragon Gate match, the six-man tag, where no one knew the story. It was action, but because of that, it was mind-blowing at the time,” he said. “It didn’t need the story behind it. The action was what a five-star match looks like.”
His own method is reactive rather than planned.
“The way I map it out is I feel what the story needs for it. Like, if we did this, what are the crowd doing? And then if the crowd are doing this, all right, let’s swerve them this way,” Ospreay said. “It’s so hard for me to explain without completely ripping the curtain off. It’s just how I plot matches together.”
He put his instinct down to something specific.
“I love action. I hate sitting around too long,” he said. “It’s the ADHD in me, and I know it is.”
The other half of the job is getting to the buildings. Ospreay did the interview in the middle of a travel day that had him fly ten hours from England to Texas and turn around the same day. He had been up at half five that morning, showered, put a hair mask in, and got on the plane.
“I got on a flight, 10 hours. The stewardesses were saying like, you conked out, and I was like, yeah, you don’t know the week I had, love,” Ospreay said.
He was in the United States for about ten hours before heading back.
Asked whether commuting across the Atlantic every week is wearing him down, Ospreay said he can feel it, but not in the way people assume.
“Once you get into a routine with it, I find it very easy. You just got to time your sleeps a little bit,” he said. “And life is noise. When I’m at home with a seven-year-old, it’s noise. It’s constant. He’s got so much energy about him. And then when I’m here, although I’m having the most fun, it is stressful, because you’re wanting to put out the best product physically possible. So it’s just noise constantly.”
The flight, by his account, is the quiet part.
“When I’m on that airplane for like eight hours, I’m fine with it. It’s just headphones on, got to listen to a bit of Oasis, and I’ll be fine,” Ospreay said.
He said the physical toll is overstated in his case.
“I do see what everyone says about the wear and tear on the body. But a lot of the time my legs are up, I’m laying down, I’m very comfortable. I’m next to my wife a lot of the time,” he said. “We’re playing Mario Kart. The actual Mario Kart, not the one I said on a promo. Just actual Mario Kart, playing with one another.”
The part he does worry about is weather and delays. He said he checks the forecast the day before and will move a flight if it looks bad, and gave credit to Bryce, who handles his travel and takes the calls when Ospreay decides at short notice to be somewhere else.
“I put him under so much stress, because I will say to him all the time, hey, can you just change this flight, I want to go here now instead,” Ospreay said. “I need to get him a little gift soon.”
He has never had a problem getting to a show, though his first day at work in AEW was one of the exceptions to a clean record.
“I’ve had one where I’ve come over, and they’ve lost my bags. That was actually my first day at work, which is hilarious,” he said.
Told that transatlantic travel wrecks most people for a week, Ospreay did not argue.
“Yes, I’m just constantly wrecked. I like it,” he said.
Ospreay is the AEW World Champion and defends against Jon Moxley at All Out on September 26.
