Apollo Crews pleaded his case against the Nigerian character before it ever aired. It ended up being the best run of his WWE career.
Crews explained how the character came together on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, starting with the fact that the core idea was his own. He pitched it while working with Big E, pointing out that neither Raw nor SmackDown had any African representation at the time. The character arrived in late 2020 and ran through 2021, with Crews turning heel, adopting the accent and being joined by Commander Azeez. He won the Intercontinental Championship during the run, beating Big E at WrestleMania 37, and held it for 124 days.
“My family is Nigerian. I’m not Nigerian by birth, but by blood I am Nigerian,” Crews said. “I was born in California, but my mom and dad are Nigerian, born and raised. And my dad came over to the United States in 1983, I believe.”
Crews said the story appealed to him because it mirrored something real. He spent part of his childhood in Uganda and Kenya, and his parents deliberately spoke English to him and his siblings at home so they wouldn’t struggle in school.
“When he looks back, he’s like, we should have spoke our language to you guys as kids,” Crews said of his father. “It would have been interesting for me, I thought, to really go back and understand and learn Nigerian culture and bring the fans along for this ride as well.”
Crews cited Black Panther, which had recently come out, and the Killmonger character in particular.
“I love the story of Killmonger and how he was coming back to claim what was rightfully his,” Crews said. “I was like, that’s a good way to kind of tell a story of me getting back in touch with my roots.”
The pitch came back with a question he wasn’t expecting.
“Apparently, the first thing that Vince at the time said was, is he going to have an accent?” Crews said.
Crews said that wasn’t part of his plan, and he fought it.
“I was really strongly against it at first, because it just didn’t make sense to me,” Crews said. “As kids, I had a lot of Nigerian American friends, so we’d kind of imitate our parents and do that accent a lot as kids. But by no means did I ever think that I was going to be doing it on TV in front of millions of people.”
Crews said he went and made his argument directly, then committed once the decision went the other way.
“Obviously, I was talked into it, and I was like, okay, well, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it 100,” Crews said. “I used a lot of just how my dad was growing up, and I was able to really immerse myself into this character. Some people loved it, some people hated it, but people were talking about it.”
The switch happened faster than he expected. Crews said he was rehearsing his first promo in his own voice when the instruction changed.
“Ten minutes before the show started, he wanted me to do one line with an accent. Ten minutes before the show started, they told me he wanted me to do the whole thing,” Crews said. “I’m just standing there rehearsing the promo, and I was like, what? Are you kidding me?”
Crews said that’s the part of the job outsiders never see.
“A lot of people will never understand that sometimes the things that go on right before you go out the curtain, people just can’t understand that unless they’re in that situation,” he said.
For all of that, Crews said the run is the high point of his WWE career.
“I was able to dive so deep into the character and almost forget that I was me,” Crews said. “I think it was easy, because I wasn’t being me, I was being something else. I felt like that was a time that things were clicking the most.”
Crews said Big E sent him a voice note after his first accented promo to tell him how proud he was, and that Terry Taylor texted to say he could tell Crews was fully invested. Paul Heyman told him something similar on Talking Smack.
His only regret is that the switch happened overnight instead of being his presentation from the start, which is what left fans asking whether the accent was real.
“If I had come on doing it, where it was like, this is who I am, and was presented this way initially, it would have been a lot different, rather than just making that transition overnight,” Crews said.
Crews said the position is a difficult one for any performer, comparing it to Kofi Kingston being asked on live television about his own accent.
“When someone asks you that, what do you say? It’s like, they made me do it,” Crews said.
He also shared a detail from that first night: the security guard standing with him was a Performance Center newcomer who’d been there two weeks.
“I remember that day, man,” Crews said. “He was telling me he just got to the Performance Center two weeks before, told me he played football in South Carolina. He said he was nervous. His knees were shaking. He felt like he was sweating.”
That newcomer was Trick Williams.
“He’s made a huge transition,” Crews said. “Such a star.”
The accent was not the first time WWE changed how Crews was presented without a public explanation. For roughly four months in 2018, he was billed simply as Apollo, with no surname.
“That was an unfortunate event where, from what I was told, they didn’t want any kind of affiliation with the Parkland shooting at the time in Florida,” Crews said, noting the shooter’s surname sounded like his own. “They just didn’t want any kind of connection with that in any kind of way. So I was just Apollo for a second.”
The shooting took place in February 2018 at a high school in Parkland, Florida. WWE never said publicly why the name changed, and the surname returned later that year after fans campaigned for it.
Crews said the irony is that the shortened version is what he had wanted from the beginning.
“To be honest, that’s what I originally wanted, was just Apollo,” Crews said. “But they wanted a last name at the time.”
He said the backlash was really about the name being taken away rather than the name itself.
“If I would have came out just with Apollo and the last name was never lost, that wouldn’t have been an issue,” Crews said.
Crews pointed to the crowd as evidence that the one-name version works better anyway.
“I think I would have loved to just be Apollo. It has a good ring to it,” Crews said. “When people chant it, they just chant Apollo anyway.”
Crews was released by WWE on April 24 after 11 years with the company, and has since debuted in TNA under his old independent name, Uhaa Nation.
