WWE Star Says Former Character Was ‘Mental Torture’ & ‘Career Suicide’

WWE

A WWE star has said that portraying their former character in the company was ‘mental torture’ and ‘career suicide’.

When LA Knight was called up to the WWE main roster back in 2022, he did so not as LA Knight, but as Max Dupri, the founder of Maximum Male Models and manager of Mace and Mansoor.

The Max Dupri character was reportedly the brainchild of Vince McMahon, with Knight seemingly on his way out of the company while portraying the gimmick up until Vince McMahon’s initial WWE retirement in July 2022.

LA Knight Says Max Dupri Was ‘Career Suicide’

Speaking on WWE Now at Fanatics Fest, LA Knight spoke about portraying Max Dupri, calling the character ‘career suicide’ and ‘mental torture’.

He said:

“The level of torture mentally that was for those few months in that, here’s this thing I did that brought me to the dance, undeniably, now you want me to just tuck it away over here? That makes sense, sure. Wait you’re gonna pay me how much? Alright I’ll think about it.

“But at the same time I’m still thinking ‘alright this is career suicide’. This is torpedoing me and I’m dead in the water at this point. But at some point when the opportunity arose that I could do me, my way, lets do that, and that’s what we did.

“Every single person standing here right now, they’re standing here because I got that opportunity to come out and do what I do my way.”

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LA Knight Pitched Return To Old Character The Same Day Vince McMahon Retired

Later on, Knight was asked about the transition from Max Dupri back to LA Knight shortly after Vince’s departure from the company.

Knight noted that he saw his two ring names trending the day that Vince retired from the company, sending the screenshot to ‘someone that might wanna see it’.

He added:

“As we talked before, circumstances had changed a little bit without getting into details, so then the option was presented to me.

“However, on the day that those circumstances changed, if you went to Twitter, you would notice two names were trending that day, and they were Max Dupri and LA Knight. So I took a screenshot of that, sent it over to someone that might wanna see it like ‘this is interesting’.

“Then it was maybe two months later where it was like ‘what do you think about going back to that?’ and I said ‘f’ing please yesterday’.”

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• wwe
• LA Knight
• Max Dupri

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