Karrion Kross has been floating in and out of various storylines for at least the past year, and fans are starting to get behind him in a big way.
He briefly showed up at WrestleMania and cost AJ Styles his match against Logan Paul, and in a post-show promo, delivered a Pipe Bomb-esque promo that's only increased support for the former NXT Champion. Unfortunately, it feels like he's still floating in limbo.
Talking to Ariel Helwani, Kross cleared up on big misconception about the comments he made after the Show of Shows. "The biggest misconception anyone can take from what I said on WrestleMania [Recap] was that I’m disgruntled. I’m not," he confirmed. "I’m just really, really, really hungry, man. I’m really hungry."
"All of this is coming from a place of passion. It’s all about the grand scheme of things. People are paying to come watch the greatest show in the world," Kross continued. "I want to be a reason on the show where they felt like they got every single cent worth of that. I want to be more than just an Easter egg."
The odds have been stacked against Kross for a while. He found great success in NXT, only to essentially be put in gimp gear (and have Scarlett taken from him) when he debuted on the main roster. Released in 2021, Kross made his return a year later when Triple H took over creative.
"I did, for sure [feel they were trying to kill him off]. That’s just me saying, ‘I think.’ That’s the way I feel. I can’t tell you for sure," he admitted when asked about that first run. "I could just tell you how I felt, and I could tell you how everybody else felt. It was a very, very weird time. Very weird."
"Everyone was like, ‘You need to call Hunter. You need to talk to him. He’s gonna fix this.’ I was like, ‘You think he’s thinking about high spots right now and gives a sh*t about any of this? The guy almost died," Kross said of a period where Triple H was dealing with heart issues and Vince McMahon was surrounded by sycophants who didn't disagree with any of the terrible ideas he came up with.
"I’m not calling him about any of this. I will figure it out, and if I don’t, I’ll live.’ That’s how I dealt with it," he added. "It was just something I had to explore and do my best to come out of it in one piece on the other side."
As for why Scarlett wasn't with him, Kross noted, "Someone who’s no longer with the company had asked her to get in the ring and move around on like a dark match. When we were still in lockdowns, you know, we were doing shows where nobody was there. She got in the ring relatively quickly and wound up getting injured. And so she was in post-recovery of that."
"We were just kind of under an assumption that we were going to be grouped back together. And then we were told we weren’t. That time was all very weird," he said, once again alluding to McMahon. "But I will say those people I was dealing with at the time, just to reiterate it, they’re not with the company anymore."
You can watch the full interview in the player below.