Willow Nightingale Explains The Inspirations For Her AEW Persona
Willow Nightingale is widely known for being one of AEW's most cheerful competitors. And while Nightingale is keen on maintaining this bright, shining attitude, she has also made it known that she isn't afraid to showcase a hard-hitting offense on her opponents. On a recent episode of "Under The Ring," Nightingale spoke about this character dynamic while further explaining the origins behind her persona.
"When I first started [wrestling], I wanted to have this brash, 'I'm going to beat you up. I'm the toughest person' [type of character], and it wasn't believable because it's not who I was. It was very inauthentic and then somebody gave me a piece advice. One of my trainers, Blake Morris, had told me, 'People have fun watching you have fun.' Of course, people can express that in a million different ways, but for me that meant like, what I do, how I have fun, find a way to put that forward. So all of my little quirks and idiosyncrasies and everything that made me comfortable being myself, I just kind of let lead the way. That's really when I started seeing things click."
In addition to the advice she received from her trainer, Nightingale later revealed that she has also drawn inspiration from Joshi wrestling, specifically from the 1990s and early 2000s. One of Nightingale's main influences from the Japanese wrestling realm is former WCW Women's Champion Akira Hokuto, who had broken her neck during a two-out-of-three falls tag team match for AJW. When Nightingale later broke her own neck in 2019, she was deeply empowered by the strength she previously had seen from Hokuto.
"She had inspired me big time in terms of like, okay, I can turn it around and I could still have the best of my career ahead of me. So I borrowed that from her. And for me, I look for tough hard-hitting people. I want my performances to, of course, be hard-hitting and tough, but [I want to] still find a way to throw my personality in there," Nightingale said.
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "Under The Ring" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.