AEW’s Chris Jericho Says 2008 WWE Heel Character Change Was The Biggest Risk Of His Career

WWE/AEW

AEW star Chris Jericho has picked his 2008 WWE heel turn as the biggest risk he’s taken with his character in his career.

Over the course of his near four decade wrestling career, Chris Jericho has evolved his character multiple times and continues to do so in his current run in All Elite Wrestling: with the multi-time world champion using monikers such as The Painmaker, Le Champion, The Wizard and The Learning Tree throughout his seven years in AEW.

While some character changes have been more polarising than others, one of the most fondly remembered eras of Jericho was when he turned heel in WWE in 2008.

Not only did his turn kick off one of WWE’s best rivalries of the past 20 years with Shawn Michaels, but it saw Jericho ditch many of the things that fans had associated him with up until that point, such as the countdown clock before his entrance music, his high energy promos and his plethora of catchphrases.

Speaking with Dan Marston, Jericho picked this character change as the riskiest of his career due to how he stripped back the things that he’d become known for:

“I think probably when I dropped the whole Y2J persona and the countdown. There was a time when I came back in 2007 where I was kind of a… not gonna say diluted… version of Chris Jericho, but you know, it wasn’t the same. I had shorter hair, and it just… times had changed, right? So, I thought, I don’t wanna do this anymore, I don’t wanna be a nostalgia act.

“So, I switched from, you know, I cut my hair, like I said. I switched from long tights to trunks. Dropped the Y2J. I told the announcers, “Don’t ever call me Y2J ever again”. Did a whole new video package that had none of that. Then, the countdown was synonymous with Jericho. Get rid of the countdown. It’s done.

“And, that was kind of the first time where I really took a shot, cos it was like, you know, it’s almost like KISS when they took off the makeup.

“You know, you’re doing something very drastic here, and you want people to understand we’re doing something different. Whether you like it or don’t like it, that’s not for us to decide, but here’s where we’re going, here’s the path that we’re taking, come on board if you want to.

“That was kind of… it was a big risk, you know, but not for long, and it’s something that I had to do.

“And, that’s when I realized I can reinvent myself whenever I start feeling a little stale, and people will like some of it, not like some of it, but I can’t worry about what people think. I just have to worry about what I can do to be the best personality I can be.”

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The host would agree with Jericho’s assessment of change, commenting, “if you’re not evolving, you’re dying”, with the AEW star then adding:

“Well, that’s exactly right. And, my biggest inspiration in show business is David Bowie. I was really obsessed and interested in really paying attention to what he was doing, which he always reinvented himself. I just did a podcast a couple of months ago of all the Bowie characters and there’s literally a dozen of them.

You could go to a Halloween party and see 12 people dressed as Bowie but different versions and you would know it’s Bowie. And it’s like that with Chris Jericho as well. Every Halloween people could come as Chris Jericho and there’s every era that you can see. So that’s what my overall goal was and it kind of worked out.”

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• AEW
• wwe
• chris jericho

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