AEW star Brian Pillman Jr. was recently interviewed on Renee Dupree’s “Cafe de Rene” podcast. During the interview, Pillman expressed disappointment over Julia Hart being removed from The Varsity Blondes. Hart was removed from the group so that they could turn her heel and join The House of Black.
“I mean, its pretty plain as day what happened, you know what I mean,” Pillman said. “As soon as we lost her, we kind of lost our edge and our spark that made us a good group, a babyface group that could have got over, you know. A lot of what we were going to do with some different spots with her had a lot to do with her cheerleading background and playing to her strengths. But somebody came in and decided that they would do better with their group and then that’s just how it goes, you know. I definitely wasn’t happy with it to be quite honest, but it is what it is. It’s not my show. It’s business but I thought maybe that probably what really stopped us from really seeing the true potential The Varsity Blondes was we lost her before we even got going.”
Pillman talked about some of the momentum they had when they first started teaming. He said, “Jacksonville and even in Texas when we first hit the road we were really a hot act, because we had her coming out and doing handsprings and stuff and she would do different cheerleading gimmicks with like the signs and then we did the spray tan thing with the Young Bucks. So she was a pretty integral part of our act. So you take that away, and then you just got a couple guys that you know. I just remember the first thing I got approved, my first big pitch was having her join us. I got that approved. It’s a great feeling when you pitch a creative idea and it’s greenlit, you know what I mean? Like the bosses are in, and they’re happy with it. So to sort of have that sort of taken apart was kind of rough for me at that point in my career. But I’m very happy with how it turned out. I’m really happy with the moment that she had at the pay-per-view. Very happy with just being in AEW in general.”
Pillman continued, “I don’t think The Varsity Blondes was like the fullest creative extension of myself. I don’t think it was. It’s not like I didn’t give a lot of my effort into it. But it was definitely something easy that I felt the crowd would digest easily. And something like Griff could work with because it’s not like me and Griff we’re just going to turn into these evil, dark and mysterious kung fu masters. It just made a lot of sense for us to have like a cool generic like rowdy just like jock gimmick. Like just a couple of young guys are getting after it. And it made it easy for us to work with a lot of people and I thought we worked well with a lot of people.”
Pillman also talked about some of the matches they had that didn’t get seen by most fans because they happened on the YouTube shows. He said, “We had some really good underrated matches on Elevation and Dark. We had like a really good match with Butcher and Blade. So some different things that we did that might not always get appreciated just because we weren’t exactly the focus point of those stories. You know what I mean? We weren’t the ones getting a push. But I think people might look back on the Varsity Blondes quite fondly, actually. Who knows what’s next for us, you know?”
This is not the first time Pillman has expressed unhappiness with his character direction. Last month, he and Griff Garrison expressed that they were not happy about being squashed on an episode of AEW Dynamite. You can read what they said by clicking here. Click below for the full interview with Pillman, Jr.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Cafe de Rene with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
