Karl Anderson, along with tag team partner and fellow Bullet Club member Luke Gallows, were already big names in wrestling circles, particularly in Japan, before joining WWE. This was also true for the third member of The Club, A.J. Styles. Anderson was recently on Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast, where he discussed the transition from Japan to WWE. Perhaps to the surprise, and chagrin, of people who aren’t WWE fans, Anderson has been quite happy with his experience.
Anderson said that The Club’s members had wanted to join WWE, but figured they had missed their chance. Now, they are there, and more importantly, they got to keep their names and be themselves. As Anderson explained it:
“I figured when we took the opportunity to go to WWE that maybe there would be a name change. And if there was, then we were fine with it because, like, it was a chance, we thought, to just get as global as possible. But I guess in our defense, or in the positive way we look at it was that we’d done so much cool stuff and so much big stuff with New Japan Pro-Wrestling and we had gotten our names out there, so much that the WWE decided that they didn’t have to change our names and they didn’t want to change our names. Maybe we had so many fans that recognized us as Karl Anderson, AJ Styles, and Luke Gallows that it’d be kind of silly to change our names. That’s how I kind of looked at it.”
On top of that, Anderson is really enjoying the freedom WWE has provided him:
“Who would have thought I would have had the freedom? Before I signed with WWE, all I ever heard from negative people was, ‘you’re not going to have any freedom to do anything.’ And if you watched us come out on RAW, you’d know that all that stuff is not true. We get to be us. We’re being ourselves.”
Although The Club has now been split up for separate shows — Styles went to Smackdown while Anderson and Gallows went to Raw — all three presumably remain quite happy with their decision to come to WWE.
(Via Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast, h/t and transcript via Wrestling Inc.)
