A background in theatre, a love of horror films, and even a warehouse job all were among the factors that led Rosemary to develop her current demonic gimmick.
Rosemary went through how the character came to be during a recent appearance on the Killing The Town podcast, hosted by Lance Storm and Cyrus.
Rosemary, who previously worked under her real name Courtney Rush, said she was seeking a drastic change to her in-ring persona "to turn everything that I was doing on its head. I had gone from being a comedy wrestler to just being a straight wrestler. Then I was like, I just want to do something really outlandish."
Rosemary decided to tap into her longtime love of horror movies to seek inspiration.
"The best thing about wrestling is it can be anything you want it to be," she said. "It can be comedy, it can be drama, it can be action, it can be romance and it can be horror. From what I could see when I would look at what had been done with horror characters in wrestling before was, if you were going to do it you need to go 100 percent into the character. You can't just kind of like be a dramatic entrance and then wrestle like everyone else."
Rosemary used her background as an actor to alter every aspect of her wrestling persona.
"I'm changing the moves that I do normally. I'm changing the way that I move. I'm changing the way I get into the ring. I just wanted to be completely immersed into this new character," she said.
She noted the character came together in SMASH Wrestling, an independent promotion that runs in the Toronto area, as part of a feud with fellow Impact Knockout Allie (also known as Cherry Bomb) that lasted almost two years.
"My hair was frying because I had dyed it so much and I wanted to cut it off anyway. Obviously, if I'm going to cut my hair and make a drastic difference, I'm going to make money off it. So I'm like, we're going to do this. ... I worked at a warehouse at the time so I did not care what I looked like," she recalled, adding, "That ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back, with just like bullying she had done throughout the year on me and it just snapped my psyche. On top of that, completely unintentionally from what we had originally been going for, she broke her collarbone—literally right after that. We were supposed to be going into a program right there so obviously she was going to be out for the next 6 months," said Rosemary.
With her rival sidelined, Rosemary advanced the storyline by focusing on the breakdown of her character into its current demonic personality.
"I was going deeper and deeper into this wretched psychosis because not only was she breaking me, I couldn't get my hands on her now, because she was injured," she explained. "So it made me go deeper and deeper and darker and darker and darker until it became like this demonically possessed human that was no longer even human anymore. I was completely embraced by the demon."
Rosemary's appearance on Killing The Town marked her first media interview since the incident with Sexy Star at AAA's TripleMania. Rosemary gave her thoughts on that and more.
