After making a name for himself in companies like TNA and the NWA, Nick Aldis made his long-awaited WWE debut last year when he joined the SmackDown brand as General Manager. It was a huge surprise and a move that was widely praised by fans.
Aldis has excelled in the role and, in a new interview with Chris Van Vliet, he talked about transitioning from being an in-ring talent to becoming an authority figure in WWE. While it was an easy decision for him, he did stop to see what his wife and fellow pro wrestler Mickie James thought.
"It’s fun. When the General Manager thing was presented to me, I talked to Mickie about it and I said they’re offering me the General Manager. She was just like, 100% take it, you’ll kill that," he recalled. "And I said well good, I did. I already said yes, and I just was like, I’m gonna be the best f*cking General Manager you’ve ever seen and we’ll go from there."
As for whether this signals the end of his career as a pro wrestler, Aldis said, "I guess. But I also don’t necessarily see it like that. 100% I see it more as a sort of maybe not a full-time wrestler, but I don’t know. Look, it gets asked all the time by everyone except me. I have never once said, hey what about me? Could I wrestle? Because I don’t need to."
"If and when the time comes it’ll be what they want, and it will hopefully be the right time. I just told them that if you want to do that, I’m ready."
Someone many fans would like to see Aldis go one-on-one with is RAW General Manager Adam Pearce. He and Aldis' characters have a fun dynamic and rivalry, with the prevailing theory being that it might eventually lead to an in-ring clash between the two GMs.
"I love the dynamic between Adam and I. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s something that you can go to, then get away from for a bit and go back to. I think Hunter’s approach and look, I don’t like to speak on his behalf, obviously, but I think that a lot of the time he does like to have a sort of combination of long-term planning and some improvisation where it’s sort of like, to me, I’ve always felt like that’s the key is you need to know where you’re going."
"You need to have a destination in mind, and you need to have, and I think you sort of have to have pit stops along the way that are sort of maybes, maybe we’ll go there, maybe this will lead to this, maybe we’ll get to that. Randy Orton RKO’d me out of the blue last time SmackDown was in Brooklyn. Then a week later, it’s like, he cuts me a check. He goes, Oh, that’s for next time, but we haven’t gone back to it thankfully. But it’s like, I think Hunter likes having fun with little things like that, laying some breadcrumbs here and there, planting a seed, whatever. And that’s how I look at me and Adam is like there’s always potential there."
While we can't imagine Aldis vs. Pearce is a major priority for WWE, Triple H does seem to be having a lot of fun teasing the possibility. As a result, it makes both RAW and SmackDown far more compelling from week to week, especially heading into a PLE like Survivor Series: WarGames.
You can check out the full interview with Aldis in the player below.