Swerve Strickland admits that Prince Nana can get him to break, but only when he stops to watch their segments back because, when he is in the moment, he's too focused on generating his own reaction from the audience.
Swerve Strickland and Prince Nana are one of the most popular acts in AEW. Part of the partnership's success is the dichotomy in their individual personalities. While Strickland is laser-focused on whatever particular task at hand he's on TV to accomplish, while Prince Nana gets to be completely let loose and has a good time dancing to Swerve Strickland's theme song.
Speaking with Fightful's Sean Ross Sapp, Strickland admits that he does eventually laugh at everything that Nana does, but will only allow himself to do so when he is watching a replay of a particular segment.
"When I watch it back, I break," he admits. "During the moments, I’m kind of tunnel vision. There are times, I don’t even look at him, I don’t see what’s happening. I’m looking at the audience and seeing who is reacting, what to play to, where do my eyes go. I want to generate reaction just from my look to the audience. Nana is generating that side, so let me get this side with my emotions and expressions. Some people want my attention from the audience. They want to see the attention of the performer, ‘hopefully he’s looking at me.’ ‘No, he’s looking at me.’ So they all make noise to try and see who the performer is really looking and engaging at. Then Nana has this whole side bumping, and I’m trying to get this whole side on another spectrum. That’s my focus on the entrance.
"I look back and see what Nana is really doing and I’m like, ‘That’s hilarious.’ There is also cool levels to it," he continued. "There are a lot of cool levels to what we’re doing and I’m really proud of it. I’m really happy with what we’ve discovered and what we continue to truly navigate through and discover. This is still really fresh. There is no wrestler, performer, manager dynamic like us. I appreciate that more than trying to be like, ‘No, managers should be doing this. Nana does this, Swerve doesn’t need this. Nana is too much of this.’ No, there is nobody doing this, and I love that. This shouldn’t be the prototypical wrestler-manager dynamic that we’ve seen since the beginning of time with pro wrestling managers. We have something dynamic that nobody else is doing. I don’t think there is a dynamic where anybody can do it."
Elsewhere in this interview, Swerve spoke about Tony Khan putting him and Nana together and reflected on Nana adding to the viral aspect of his act. Read his comments here.
In past interviews with Fightful's Grapsody, Swerve has compared Nana to Andre 3000. Read those comments at this link.
