NZPWI had the opportunity to speak to “The Rated-R Superstar” Adam Copeland on location in Brisbane, Australia.
The 11-time world champion will be part of AEW Grand Slam: Australia, where he teams with New Zealand’s “Switchblade” Jay White against Claudio Castagnoli and AEW World Champion Jon Moxley in a Brisbane Brawl.
Copeland spoke to NZPWI’s David Dunn about extensive travel, balancing the builds to Grand Slam and Revolution, writing an autobiography, and more in this exclusive interview conducted Thursday, February 13.
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David Dunn: Thank you for travelling halfway across the world to come down here. How much of your job would you consider to be what happens bell-to-bell and how much would you consider to be the travel?
Adam Copeland: The travel, the hotels is 99 percent of it. I’ve always said that’s what you get paid for, the being away from your family, the sleeping in strange beds, being on planes with people that fart beside you, or are sick. That’s what the majority of the job is. The time in the ring, the time creating … that’s the really, really fun part, and that’s why you do it, honestly. It’s all of that time to get to those moments in the ring where you’re just, I don’t know, there’s a freedom to it. You’re out there exploring and you have to be in the moment or you can get really, really hurt.
Unfortunately you have been really, really hurt – only recently back from an injury. What gets you through what must be a very challenging time?
I’ve always looked at injuries and surgeries as challenges. I find if I reframe it that way then I attack them, as opposed to just wait. ‘What do I gotta do and when can I do it?’ I wait until I get the clearance, but I’ve always just looked at each injury as, ‘Okay, I can come back from this one, sure I can’. I came back from the neck after nine years so a broken leg ain’t gonna stop me. And I don’t think about getting hurt, I don’t think about injuries. I haven’t thought about the leg until people ask me. I just came back and started doing my thing again. The second you start thinking about those things, trying to protect those things, that’s probably when you’re going to get injured again.
You’ve come back, and with a modification of your ring name. How do you go from being recognised by one name for so long to using a different name and now going by ‘Cope’?
The thing with wrestling, and I’ve tried to relate this or draw an analogy, you wouldn’t go up to Johnny Depp and go, ‘Mr Scissorhands, oh my god’. But you might go up to Michael Richards and go ‘Kramer!’ because for every week for years and years and years you saw this man play that one character. Same with wrestling. For 25 years I played a certain character so people are gonna know that character.
In coming over to AEW, we started with my real name, and we still use that too. It’s not like we don’t say Adam Copeland any more, it’s not like, ‘I’m Cope and that’s it!’ Cope’s just what I was always called by my friends. That’s what I’ve been called since I’ve been 10 years old. And in my way of thinking is, ‘The Rated R Superstar Adam Copeland’ starts to feel like a paragraph. Whereas if I’m looking on a marquee, ‘Cope vs. Mox’. That’s it. But it’s not like the announcers have stopped called me Adam Copeland or it’s some hard line in the sand. Nah, it’s a nickname. Just like Edge was a nickname.
Cope vs. Mox is the direction for AEW Revolution, but you’re here now for Grand Slam. How do you go about dealing with a story where you’re building towards one thing but it can’t peak just yet…
You have to get the business of this tag team match done and build that before you can fully get into the full build of that.
A lot of spinning plates.
A lot of spinning plates. It’s a fun creative – it’s not even a problem – it’s a fun creative space to be navigating from. To go, ‘Okay, we’ve got these two cool matches and we’ve got to figure out how to build each one without taking away from each one’. As of now, I think it’s airing as we speak, the challenge is accepted and it’s now official at Revolution. That to me kind of helped, ‘Okay, that one is set, we got this tag match, we’ll just add one more layer to that singles match’. And also, just really fun to get to team with a guy I’ve never teamed with before. I already feel like we have good chemistry together because we think very similar, in Jay White. That’s super fun. And getting to wrestle Claudio as well, I think I’ve been in the ring with him once, and that’s since I’ve come back, we’ve never wrestled. Same with Moxley and I before all of this. That’s fun, that’s really fun. I love when I can get in there with new opponents and just feel how that is. And I think at this point now I’ve been in with all the Shield guys after Revolution. Those were three guys at the top of the list that I wanted to wrestle coming back.
Cast your mind back to 2004 when your book came out. What was the writing process like for you? You’ve had five, six, 20 books worth of material since then – how do you know you’ve done enough in a career to publish a book? Might you put out a second?
When they first asked me back in 2002, I was like, ‘This feels really soon’. But they were at a stage at that point where they wanted to release books by younger talent. They wanted to release one from me, they wanted to release one from The Hardys, and that was the lane they were going for. So I said, ‘Okay, yeah, but I wanna write it, I don’t want a ghost-writer, I don’t want whiff. I want it to be written by Adam Copeland so that hopefully when you read it you hear my voice. Because it’s me that wrote it.’ The process was actually quite fun. I wrote it initially while I was off with my first broken neck – which just sounds ridiculous in itself. I wrote it while I was sitting on my couch, and I wrote it longhand. I went through my journals because I’ve kept journals my entire career just to kind of remind me, to brush the dust off the old cranium a little bit. It was a fun process, it was.
There was once point where I got halfway through writing another book and then the muse just kind of danced away. But I just recently signed another book deal to release another one. So now I gotta get writing [laughs] because the crazy thing is, like you said, even in the build up to the first one … I feel like I’ve lived more in this time-frame from the first one than I did in the first 25 years or whatever it was. So it should be fun, hopefully.
Cope teams with Jay White to wrestle the Death Riders in a Brisbane Brawl at AEW Grand Slam: Australia, streaming Sunday, February 16, from 4:30pm (NZDT) on TrillerTV.
