Most WWE talent treat NXT as the launching pad to the main roster. Sidney Akeem made the trip in reverse, and he says saying no to it was never really an option.
Akeem, who worked the main roster as Reggie and later became Scrypts in NXT, talked about the move with Duke Hanson on Between Two Jobs, as F4W/WON reported. He tied the timing to the change at the top of the company.
“So two years whenever that switch happened between Vince and Triple H, that’s when I came back to NXT,” Akeem said.
He said the move followed a failed attempt to reinvent himself as his four-time run with the 24/7 Championship was winding down. Akeem tried to pitch a new direction to an executive and left feeling like it had not landed.
“It wasn’t a conversation. It was just, I tried to have a conversation with someone. I had a conversation with him trying to rewrite myself because we knew the 24/7 stuff was going down the drain,” Akeem said. “And I’m like, I have this idea, this character with the mask and this and that, Rey Mysterio’s on board and it’d be super cool. And he said, alright, he’s looking at me as I’m talking to him but he’s not listening. And so I left the conversation, left the room thinking like, that was a waste, that didn’t get anywhere.”
The answer came from a different direction not long after.
“And then I get a message from John Cone saying, hey Reg, we’re thinking about sending you back to NXT, how you feel about that? I said, cool. And that was it,” Akeem said. “I wasn’t gonna say nah. I would have got fired.”
The masked idea Akeem pitched did make it to NXT in a form, as the Scrypts character, though not the way he had drawn it up. His original plan had Rey Mysterio handing him a mask after a six-man tag, a story that never played out as intended. He has since said his current independent character, Soleil, is what Scrypts was always meant to be.
Akeem’s WWE contract expired in 2024, and he has since worked GCW, ROH and TNA.
