Renee Paquette, formerly known as Renee Young in WWE, further elaborates her reasoning for leaving WWE.
Renee’s last day with WWE was back at SummerSlam in August, ending her long tenure with the company where she filled a variety of roles from host, to interviewer to Raw commentator and more. Speaking to the Sunday Night’s Main Event podcast, Renee said she felt like she’s done everything she could in WWE and that she did not want to waste any more time.
She added that she felt like WWE didn’t necessarily know what to do with her at times and felt like doing backstage interviews again was a bit of a step back for her. Renee said she wants to keep growing and doing so on bigger platforms. However, Renee did say that her testing positive for COVID-19 was not a reason for her wanting to leave the company.
"I've been there for eight years and I kind of did everything that I could possibly do and I just felt like I was bouncing around and continually trying to carve this path out for myself and I just feel like I hit my ceiling. My strength is being a TV host and as I've realized more and more that like, after doing commentary and stuff and doing that for a year plus, that was really rocky for me," Renee said. "I didn't enjoy doing it and then not really having a solid role on SmackDown when I was listed as being a special contributor and whatever that's supposed to mean and then that never actually turned out to mean something. I don't know. I just started to feel like they didn't know what to do with me either. Just having me on TV and doing backstage interviews again felt like a step back and there was just nowhere for me to go. There was nothing for me to do anymore, especially when Backstage got canceled with FS1. I was really enjoying doing that and I'm gonna still be doing stuff with FOX going forward, so that's really cool, but yeah, I feel like I had checked all of the boxes and I feel like I turned over every card that I could there and I didn't want to waste any more time. I'm about to turn 35 and I've done a bunch of stuff there and it was like, 'Time to move on.' I wanna keep growing and getting better and finding a bigger platform to be on, I just felt like that wasn't the place to do it anymore, especially not being a wrestling talent, I always sort of felt underutilized because of that. I was never meant to be the 'talent talent' and that's always a bit of a tough pill to swallow when you take pride in your work and you know you're good at what you do, but not getting those opportunities because I don't wrestle, you know?"
The full interview can be heard at this link.
