Ethan Page says he could make himself the most loved wrestler in WWE within three weeks if he wanted to, and that the only reason he hasn’t is that he isn’t there to be liked.
Page stayed in character for his interview on TMZ’s Inside the Ring, and the comments below are him working rather than speaking as himself. Taken at face value they are an accusation against the entire roster, which is the point of them.
He built the argument by asking the interviewer where WWE’s money comes from, then answering it.
“Customer. Now, how are you going to get this money from the customer? Manipulate them. You manipulate them,” Page said. “Look, if I want to be the most loved guy in WWE, you give me three weeks and I’ll figure it out. It’s manipulation.”
His claim is that he opts out of it.
“I’m not trying to make people love me. That’s my point. I’m not here to sell T-shirts,” he said. “I’m here for my childhood fantasy of becoming the Intercontinental Champion, then going on to becoming World Champion, Universal Champion, Royal Rumble winner, King of the Ring winner, all that stuff. I’m gonna do all that stuff. That’s why I’m here.”
From there he turned it on everyone else.
“Everyone else is here for this, and to get this put on billboards. It’s very vain and ego-driven, ironically. And money is big,” Page said. “They’re gonna lie to you to sell T-shirts. They’re gonna lie to you to sell action figures. They’re gonna lie to you to sell tickets. Everyone here is a liar but me.”
Earlier in the interview he made the same case about ego, arguing that his is the smallest on the roster and that the difference is he admits to having one.
“I think ultimately everybody has it. The only issue is that I’m very open about mine, and others are very closed off about theirs, and they pretend they don’t have it, or they present it as confidence,” he said. “I’m just the only one that wears it on my sleeve.”
The same argument ran into a question about how wrestlers use social media, where he wanted to know why they only reply to the fans who insult them.
“You have wrestlers get upset when fans tweet them. They’re responding,” Page said. “What are you responding to fans for? Why don’t you respond to the ones that compliment you? Only the ones that hurt your feelings, that tell you the truth, are the ones you’re giving attention?”
He said his own experience of saying what he thinks has never gone well.
“Never worked for me. It’s always blown up in my face. No one wants to hear the truth, know the truth, understand the truth, because we all ultimately do,” Page said. “Deep down we all know the truth, but no one wants to live in that. Everyone would rather have this unspoken agreement that we’re going to ignore this one thing that we all know is true, but it’s okay, we’re not going to talk about it. We’re just gonna pretend it didn’t happen. That’s life.”
He said it is not confined to wrestling. “It runs rampant. No one wants authenticity. No one wants genuine, honest, nothing, ever.”
Asked whether being that person is a problem, Page reframed it.
“I’m being chosen by a bunch of phonies to be the bad guy. But I am the villain to them. I put the mirror up, and they don’t want to see the reflection,” he said. “To say that someone being honest is the problem, that’s wrong. The problem is that I get off on doing it.”
He was blunt about how he responds to the pushback.
“The more I realise that people don’t want to see the truth, the more I’m like, no, no, no, we’re gonna make sure you see it, and everyone watches you see it,” Page said.
He also said locker rooms are an easier place to trust people than they used to be, though he did not put that in flattering terms. “I think trusting people now is probably safer than back in the day. More people are a lot softer now,” he said.
Chelsea Green said on Insight last week that she left X permanently because engaging with it was turning her into an online vigilante and was affecting relationships at work, and named Page as the person who held her to leaving. He texted her telling her not to embarrass herself by coming back again.
Page has been on Raw since April, working alongside Rusev. He is a former NXT Champion and NXT North American Champion and a two-time TNA World Heavyweight Champion, and has not yet held a title on the WWE main roster. He lost a number-one contender’s match for the Intercontinental Championship to Dragon Lee on the August 31 Raw, which is the title he names first in the list of things he says he came for.
