Kip Sabian reflects on Sting conversing with him about drawing ideas for his wrestling character by watching TV shows and movies.
When Sting changed his character to a take on Brandon Lee's Crow in 1996, it ended up defining his character for the next two-and-a-half decades. Now, Sting works for All Elite Wrestling, and while he's still portraying a version of that Crow-based character, his most significant contributions to AEW lay within the knowledge that he passes down to younger wrestlers.
Kip Sabian is one of those younger wrestlers. During a recent appearance on the Sappenin' Podcast, Sabian reflected on speaking with Sting about finding inspiration for his character through pop culture and named some of the properties from which he has taken inspiration.
"You can learn so much more when you don’t have the ability to wrestle because you have to put 100% into these other fields," said Kip. "For me, it was, ‘how can I change promos?’ I’d be recording myself cutting promos with different voices and mannerisms that I liked and would steal from TV shows or movies. Me and Sting had a conversation before we had the match a month or two ago where, I was talking to him about how a lot of the stuff that he originally got his big gimmick change was from The Crow. He was saying how he likes to draw a lot of his gimmicky stuff from TV shows and movies. My brain is exactly the same. I don’t watch movies anymore or TV shows without analyzing everything, and it sucks. I love The Lost Boys, the way Kiefer Sutherland acts, and his vibe, I try and take a lot of those kind of things because I really like the mentality that he has in that movie. The Joker mannerism, the Riddler, there are a bunch of different characters that I draw from that I wouldn’t have really thought about unless I was away from the ring."
In the past, Sabian has discussed the origin of his box gimmick. Learn more here.
As for The Stinger, Sting recently stated that he knows his time in the ring is coming to an end very soon. Learn more here.
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