Corey Graves Recalls Shooting NWA Angle For Match With Christian

Christian was a guest on WWE After The Bell with Corey Graves this past week, and the two talked about Christian's career as a tag team wrestler with Edge, and as a singles star. As Christian named wrestlers that he would have like to face now, Graves recollected a time when he and Christian could have had a match but timing and scheduling got in the way.

"As you were telling that story and you were talking about AJ Styles, it reminded me of the match that never was between you and I," Graves revealed. "We shot an angle in England. You were the NWA Champion at the time, and we shot an angle on the first night of a two-night set. Apparently, nobody ever bothered to consider that you had to fly back to Toronto to shoot a movie.

"So we booked this angle with me against you, and it just never happened. Now it never will.

"Leave them wanting more," Christian said. "You know what we can do? We can do that scene in Rocky, where we just end up in an empty gym somewhere. We go to lock up, and ding, it's over."

Graves asked Christian if he ever had aspirations for a broadcasting career. He said he did, and he talked about how the Edge and Christian Show was first thought of and created.

"I did have some visions of trying to do what you do at some point," Christian said. "We've talked about this before. We talked about when you were on our podcast. It's a hard job, and you are really good at what you do to make it look as easy as you do. Michael Cole as well. It's a tough job, tough job to do. But talking about The Edge and Christian Show, what happened was that Edge and I had done the Steve Austin podcast.

"I think I jokingly said on there that they're gonna give us our own Network show, and we're gonna do this every week. Then somebody, when we were done that, had said, 'hey, maybe you guys should do a show.' Yeah, let us know. We were just kind of leaving it at that. Next thing you know, we did get a call a few weeks later saying, 'hey, do you guys really want to try to do something?' We were like sure, what do you want to do? Well, it's up to you," Christian revealed about the conversation. "So we started spit-balling ideas, and we came up with The Edge and Christian Show That Totally Reeks of Awesomeness, basically a variety show. It had never been done before. It was a variety show with a wrestling theme. It gave us a chance to get WWE superstars to play against type and put them in different situations that you wouldn't expect to see them and have some fun times working with a great script, ad-libbing and having a lot of fun."

Richard Jewell star Paul Walter Hauser was once a writer on The Edge and Christian Show and shared with Wrestling Inc. a sketch that he wrote for a Sycho Sid biopic. Edge had talked about before about all of the crazy things that would happen in season two of the show, but Christian says that the two, along with other writers, really focused in after season one to write out the whole show to make the process more smoother.

"The first season was like any show," Christian said. "There were some growing pains. The first three or four episodes just trying to see what works, what doesn't. What is this show really, going through some different writers. Edge and I took on a more hands-on approach as far as writing goes. We ended up tightening up our writing group to about five people, kept it really small. By the first season, we were writing in chunks, then we'd shoot in chunks. We'd write in chunks, then shoot in chunks. Nothing like that had been done before so we didn't figure it out until half-way into the first season what this actually was.

"Once we hit that and got our stride, the second season, we decided we're gonna hunker down in North Carolina. All in a room, for a week, we're gonna write the entire season in a week. That's what we did. The second season we wrote the entire thing first before anything was shot, and I think that really helped out the process and made things a lot smoother."

Christian also talked about how WWE superstars enjoyed their time filming the show and would always be eager to come back to shoot more things for the show. Graves agreed and said the show allowed superstars to go outside of the box in WWE.

"Superstars were saying, 'I don't know that's kind of weird.' You're kind of asking people to come on and do some things," Christian said. "They're on the road doing different stuff, and we'd always try to make it as easy as possible for people to shoot, but the cool things was that every superstar to a tee, when they were done, would say, 'I will come back and do whatever you guys want me to do. That was the most fun I've had in a long time.'

"That's the truth. I was lucky enough to do a few things with you guys," Graves said. "It was just so different from anything that happens in the walls of WWE. On television, you're kind of stuck to your character, at least in it's parameters, and to do something that far out of the box was a blast."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit After The Bell with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.