AEW star reveals inspiration for character

Malaki Black’s inspiration for his AEW character came from his family roots growing up. In an interview with CBS Sports, Black spoke about his AEW character and where the basis from it came from.

“I’m big into tattoo culture,” Black said. “I’m very much into the alternative music scene. It’s predominately black metal and hardcore. I have a fascination with the occult because I grew up in a certain household that had some very disturbing and interesting things. So I know how to live these cult-like characters because I grew up with it. I understand this. This is part of myself that I can put into these characters. Within a year, two years from that it started taking off. It has to contain an essence of yourself. I do think that when you grow up, you start to understand a lot more of yourself. Especially your past traumas. You start to acknowledge and you start to overcome. And when you overcome them, you can draw from them. You know they don’t fight against you. They work with you … The older you get, the more you understand yourself.”

Black went deeper on his childhood and said he grew up in a end of the world type religion.

“Parts of my family grew up with a type of religion that wasn’t common and it was a very ‘end of the world’ type religion,” Black said. “It was a very doomsday, you’re on this Earth so you’re a sinner. It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re sent here on Earth and you will sweat and toil. There is no love. There is no affection. There was no nothing. There was just you [and] God working for your redemption. And, hopefully, by the end of that redemption, by the end of your life, you have redeemed yourself enough so that you’ve earned a spot in paradise. The ’50s, ’60s and ’70s were such a pivotal time for a lot of people where the world started changing and opening up minds. New ideas would come in. A lot of my family was very conflicted in that ideology. It affected them in a negative way, in a way that they wanted to escape from it. So they did, but it did affect their personalities and it did affect their ways of perceiving the world because they didn’t get it because they were sheltered for so long… That religion, even back then, had cult-like tendencies. A lot of things that happened in that church were very questionable.”

Black added to his House of Black faction in AEW on Wednesday’s Dynamite. Brody King made his AEW debut and joined Black.

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