QT Marshall was recently interviewed by Sportskeeda WrestleBinge. Marshall recently returned to AEW after departing at the end of December.
QT Marshall on working in AEW:
“I mean, when I started from day one, I was Cody’s assistant and worked all the way as hard as I could behind the scenes with hopes to, you know, just get as far along as I could all the way to Vice President. Then what happened was, ideally, I became a talent at the same time. During the pandemic, I was offered a talent contract and that was like the only thing legally binding me to AEW. So right about August of this year, my contract was coming up, August of 2023 right before All In, I actually had given my notice then that I was going to leave and I was just gonna go wrestle. I had some of the things I wanted to do. Then Tony and I spoke and he was like, ‘Well, why don’t you stay? Maybe I can do something with you more as the AAA Latin American champion and stuff’, and I was like, ‘Okay, sure.’ Ideally, I didn’t know what I was really going to do. I had spoken to Scott D’Amore over at Impact and maybe I was gonna go do something for them. Tony was very understanding towards all of this stuff. So I signed this extension, and then came time for the end of the year and Tony and I kind of spoke a little bit about stuff, and my biggest thing was I just didn’t want to sign a long term contract. That’s it, but because of that, I had to resign from the job itself. I couldn’t do one or the other. So it was like, Hey, I’m going to resign. I have this idea to do Turnbuckle Championship Wrestling with Teil. I just have a lot of things I wanted to do. I just kind of wanted to relax. I’ve been on the road five years straight. I mean, I’ve never publicly stated stuff, but like, man, I worked harder than most people at AEW and if that ruffles feathers, I don’t care. I did. I busted my butt for them in hopes that maybe it would lead to more in the ring, maybe, but they’re two separate things. When we spoke, Tony and I spoke about that, we both are on the same page about like, hey, well, you know, a lot of people think I left to become this big star. It’s not what it was at all”
On possibly going to WWE:
“Tony and I have spoken numerous times about this. I’m not gonna go to WWE just to be a producer. I could do that at AEW where I can work one day a week. I’m number whatever in the company in the top 10, whereas if I go to WWE, I start at the bottom. I make less money. I’m on the road more. The only perk is that I get to be with my friend, Cody. Just to say that I worked for the WWE, which, hey, it’s been my dream since I was eight years old, but it’s not my dream to be a producer for the WWE.”
On going back to AEW:
“I flew down to Jacksonville to talk to Tony in December maybe, or maybe the first week of January, or something like that. I was just talking to him about stuff and explaining what I wanted to do with the Turnbuckle stuff. I could go on the Indies and wrestle all the time. you know, go from Massachusetts on Friday to San Diego on Saturday back to somewhere else on Sunday. That’s the Indies. I could do that and I might do that because that’s kind of the benefit I have with working with AEW and that’s the biggest thing. There’s freedom and there’s great pay which I’ve earned. So it’s like, hey, I did step away, and the direction that AEW was going in at that moment when I was there, when Tony and I had our discussion, which would have been in Oakland, November 10th. That’s when I had spoken to him and let him know that I was going to be staying home. So it’s not like at the end of November I put out a statement and that was like the first anyone heard about it. I had been sitting home for weeks. So Tony and I, like I said, we have a very, very different relationship than many people do. We were in the trenches together during the pandemic. We were up till 7 AM writing shows and doing stuff. I don’t ever go on the internet and argue with people. It’s not worth it to me. I know what I do. I know what I’ve done. I know what my job consists of. I never once wrote TV for other people. I never once wrote TV for myself. I did my job that I was told to do. I think the greatest conflicting story to me was, you know, QT wanted to be on TV all the time and he wanted to be a big star. Okay, so why would I do QTV and be Will Hobb’s manager if I had dreams of being a humongous TV wrestling star? You know what I mean? I did what I was told to do.
On what his new role is:
“So basically, by the end, when I say the end, by the end of like last year when I was about to exit, I wasn’t really doing as much as I was doing because we had Jimmy Jacobs come in. So we just go to work. I sit in the office with Tony, He bounces ideas and I gave him my opinion, but at the end of the day, he’s the boss. I think that’s more or less what this is about it is he understood where I was coming from in the sense of like, could I go get a job with WWE? I’m sure. I spoke to MLW. I spoke to a bunch of players. I’m sure I could get a job somewhere. but again, I think it’s, why do something else if I know that this is, like I already know this, I don’t want to say this devil because the AEW is not a devil, but like, I know this extreme. I know what this is. I’m comfortable with this and I can handle it. The report came out. I mean, we probably agreed to everything six weeks ago. I haven’t left my house since. It’s been since the second week of January, maybe, and I haven’t been to an AEW show and that’s been part of the idea because of all the other stuff I have going on. It’s, how can we kind of help each other and so on and so forth? I’m back to the same old position, Vice President of Creative Coordination and a lot of it is dealing with the talent and it’s getting the talent’s idea.”
On if he saw Cody Rhodes being a big star in WWE:
“I did. When he went back to WWE and I saw the reactions he was getting, and then, you know, gutting it out with a torn pack, that’s unheard of. The only thing I didn’t think, and he’ll probably be upset with me for saying this, was that he was going to turn my hero, The Rock into a bad guy. That’s a lot of power.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Sportskeeda with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Quotes were transcribed by Jim for WrestlingNews.co.
