AEW Women’s World Champion Thekla sat down with Renee Paquette for a wide-ranging conversation in Portland, Maine while dealing with food poisoning from the night before, and spent much of the interview making a case that she is one of the more eclectic personalities in professional wrestling. She had not eaten in 18 hours when the interview began.
The first topic Paquette pressed on was the band. Thekla’s punk band, Death Row Groupies, toured Europe extensively, hitting Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Switzerland, and Austria. She played guitar despite describing herself as poor at it.
“I really like the simple stuff, because I’m just bad at guitar. I’m good at writing songs, but I just had to come up with the simple stuff.”
She also played violin for a period before the guitar became her main instrument. She said she has been itching to put Death Row Groupies back together and wants to eventually tour the United States, adding that she plans to reach out to AEW’s Brody King for connections to help make it happen.
“I always wanted to do a road trip through the states. New Orleans, California, New York. Just tour everywhere.”
On the subject of punk, she noted the irony of one of her guilty pleasures. The interview included a caviar course, which she attacked despite the food poisoning.
“I love caviar. It’s not very punk rock of me, I know, but I think if you own it, it doesn’t matter.”
Away from music, Thekla is a visual artist who attended art school and has exhibited internationally, including a group show in Miami alongside Lee Moriarty. She paints her own costume designs for AEW and described the wrestling world as her biggest artistic inspiration.
“There are not a lot of people who cover wrestling from the inside, because you don’t have a lot of people who are visual artists as well as performers in the ring. I try to tell stories from my point of view.”
Her art ranges from women fighting to what she called a personal obsession with cowgirls, cowboys, cacti, and desert imagery, along with what she described as very ugly horses. She grew up watching her mother paint, which shaped her own approach to color and composition. Her mother is from Georgia, the country bordering Russia, left after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and moved to Austria where Thekla was born.
On top of the band and the art, Thekla grew up as a theater kid. Her father ran technical operations at Vienna’s biggest theater stage and she spent her childhood backstage, eventually performing as a child actress in German and Austrian plays.
“I always wanted to be an actress when I was a kid, and then a fashion designer, and then a filmmaker. I ran down the whole line of creative people.”
She speaks five languages: German, English, Spanish, Japanese, and some Georgian, which she picked up from her mother’s side of the family. She described her Georgian as functioning at roughly the level of a child.
Thekla did not discover wrestling until she was 18 or 19, when she attended a show called Rock and Roll Wrestling Bash and Bash at a punk and metal venue in Vienna. The promoter mixed a live band with wrestling and allowed the audience to stand at ringside.
“What drew me in was this insanely crazy spectacle that I was able to be so close to, while it had elements of what I really liked, like rock and roll and metal and punk. I wanted to know what this was about.”
The first wrestler she was drawn to was Rey Mysterio.
Her stated death row meal is a Spanish dish she discovered while living in Spain: Gambas al Pil Pil, tiger shrimp served in boiling garlic oil with a baguette.
“I’d like two portions of that. Okay, I’m ready to go.”
The one box she has not yet checked is filmmaking, which she described as a long-term goal rather than something in the immediate plans.
“At some point I’ve always wanted to make a movie. It’s really hard putting a crew together and putting a real movie together, but I’d like to do it.”
Thekla defends her AEW Women’s World Championship in a four-way match at AEW Double or Nothing this Sunday, May 24 at Louis Armstrong Stadium in Queens, New York. The show airs on HBO Max PPV at 8 p.m. ET. The Buy In begins at 7 p.m. ET with Mick Foley joining Renee Paquette as co-host. The confirmed card is as follows:
AEW World Championship, Title vs. Hair: Darby Allin (c) vs. MJF (if MJF loses, he must shave his head)
AEW Women’s World Championship, Four-Way: Thekla (c) vs. Kris Statlander vs. Jamie Hayter vs. Hikaru Shida
AEW International Championship: Kazuchika Okada (c) vs. Konosuke Takeshita
AEW World Tag Team Championship, I Quit New York Street Fight: FTR – Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler (c) vs. Adam Copeland and Christian Cage (if Copeland and Cage lose, they cannot team together again)
AEW Continental Championship, No Time Limit: Jon Moxley (c) vs. Kyle O’Reilly
Stadium Stampede, 14-Man: Chris Jericho, Bobby Lashley, Shelton Benjamin, Kenny Omega, Jack Perry, Matt Jackson and Nick Jackson vs. Ricochet, Bishop Kaun, Toa Liona, Mark Davis, Andrade El Idolo, Clark Connors and David Finlay
Men’s Owen Hart Cup Quarterfinal: Will Ospreay vs. Samoa Joe
Men’s Owen Hart Cup Quarterfinal: Swerve Strickland vs. Bandido
Women’s Owen Hart Cup Quarterfinal: Willow Nightingale vs. Alex Windsor
5-Minute Tag Team Eliminator: Divine Dominion – Megan Bayne and Lena Kross vs. Zayda Steel and Viva Van
10-Man Tag Team: Orange Cassidy, Mark Briscoe, Roderick Strong, AJ Befumo and QT Marshall vs. Shane Taylor Promotions
The full interview is available via AEW’s official YouTube channel.
