John Morrison (@TheRealMorrison) is a professional wrestler currently signed to AEW. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to discuss losing a hair vs. hair match at CMLL and now being bald, his wife Taya’s reaction to the new look, replacing Chris Benoit at Vengeance and winning the ECW World Championship in 2007, his dive from the top of the Elimination Chamber, his parkour Royal Rumble save, having more than 34 names throughout his pro wrestling career, and more!

Are you getting used to seeing yourself with no hair?

“No. Imagine your whole life, every time you see your reflection there’s a guy there with hair. I never shaved my head. But more than that, for the last 24 years, 25 years, I’ve had long hair. When I got my WWE contract in 2003 that was the day I stopped getting haircuts. Basically, I just grew it out from then till now.” 

I want to read you some comments I saw on Twitter: “John Hennigan makes me sick. The guy loses a hair match and somehow looks even better than he did.”

“[Laughs] Is that from Taya?”

“I was baffled. He should have celebrated like he was the winner.”

“I gotta admit, the match did feel fantastic. That hair match, I feel like, was one of the best matches I’ve had in years. Was the first time in a while that I felt like me again. Kind of feeling unfulfilled, basically. Not just me, a lot of people in wrestling. But for me right now, in AEW, I feel underutilized. Can’t blame anyone, that’s just how wrestling promotions work. There’s only enough TV time for a certain amount of people. Those people at AEW, we’ve coined the term the island. Those people are on the island, so to speak. I don’t feel like I’m on the island with Tony or AEW right now. So because of that, I feel like I’m doing like 10-20% of what I’m capable of, storytelling-wise, wrestling-wise, in the ring. With CMLL, I’m on their island, and so I got to do everything that I could, and it was cool.”

Had you been thinking for a while about shaving your head?

“A little bit. Honestly, my acting coach [Hank] has been on me for years about shaving my head. I had a bunch of missed calls when I got back from Mexico. It’s all him going, ‘Hey, you got to take some photos. You could go out for cop roles, soldier rules, all kinds of stuff. The world is your oyster now, come on.’ Thanks, Hank. He doesn’t have social so one of those comments wasn’t his, but he’s excited.”

So what’s interesting is, you get your head shaved. Everybody sees it first. You don’t. So when did you finally look in the mirror and see what it looked like?

“So as soon as I come back from the match, honestly, Mexico City is like a mile and a half above sea level. My hands are on my knees, looking down for like 30 seconds before I find a mirror and Whoa! A couple of things, a few days prior, actually, three days prior to this match, I came back to LA and I had to shoot a bunch of projects because I was shaving my head, continuity-wise, I had to finish up a bunch of stuff that had just kind of been on the to-do list. So two days before the match, I was doing a Bat in the Sun superpower beat down video playing Casey Jones and fighting foot soldiers. There’s this one part where I kept choking this guy with a pay phone cord, ‘You got a collect call from pain 101!’ But the pay phone was a prop, and it kept falling and gashing me in the head. There was one time I got gashed there and I started bleeding a little bit, which doesn’t really matter, because if you have hair, you can’t see it. But I was thinking about that before the hair vs. hair match, I was like, I wonder if I have those marks from the pay phone fight scene on my head, and then I wonder if all those times Sabu hit me in the head with chairs, or a kendo stick to the head from Sheamus, or something, I just never noticed they have a gnarly scar. When you look in the mirror, I was like yep, I guess I was right about the pay phone marks, because I am kind of cut up. Either that or the barber character in CMLL. She shaved me pretty quickly without a guard on the razor.”

What does Taya think of this?

“She was one of the first people to say I think John looks amazing, which, I mean, probably the most important perspective to me of anyone in the world. Wife, she’s cool with it. All right, I’m fine with it.” 

Who was the first person in your WWE career to say, hey, you kind of look like Jim Morrison?

“I can’t remember, but it wasn’t a thing that had happened like super frequently. Was more so that, and we’ve talked about this, I think. When I won the ECW championship, I was Johnny Nitro. Prior to that, Vince had mentioned a few times that Johnny Nitro is not a champion’s name, or not a good name, ‘You got to change it.’ [I responded]’Why do you think that, Vince? Is it because it reminds you of WCW Monday Nitro?’ [Vince said] ‘Yes.’ The day after I won the championship. Actually the week after, because the day after, everyone on the roster got some very bad news. But we can talk about that if you want later. The week after, Vince walked up to me in catering, which is rare, and said, ‘You got to change your name.’ Put a paper down on the table and a pen and said, ‘Just make a list of names.’ So I was really on the spot, and I just started writing down what could be an M and M name that fits? Then I was like, maybe Johnny Brando, John Morrissey, John Morrison, couldn’t think of very many Ms, so I made a list of kind of like celebrity, Brando, Morrison, Johnny Brando, stuff like that. The first one that I’d written down was John Morrison, and a couple of hours later, I handed this list to Vince, and he just went like this and read the top was like, ‘John Morrison, I like it. That’s it.’ So then after that, I kind of went from this Johnny Nitro wet hair look to getting the makeup department to flat iron my hair. I used to say I wanted it to look like Farrah Fawcett’s hair. But once I started doing that and wearing aviators, I got a ton of people saying, You look just like Jim Morrison, even to the point where I started getting fans asking me if I was Jim Morrison’s brother sometimes, and I would sometimes make a smart ass comment, like, I mean, he died in 79 if I’m his brother, am I a vampire? Now I’d be like, 80 years old. I don’t know how to do the math. The math doesn’t math on that.”

You mentioned winning the ECW championship. So that was at Vengeance, Night of Champions 2007. It was supposed to be Chris Benoit versus CM Punk for the vacant ECW championship. At what point do you realize throughout the day, Chris Benoit is not showing up, and I’m his replacement?

“So we’re at Vengeance 2007, not everyone’s there. It’s a pay-per-view, but I happen to be there. The ECW roster didn’t have a lot of representation at that particular event. Say call time, I think it was maybe 2 pm.” 

Were you booked to do anything? 

“No, I was like a standby. I was booked to be there, maybe have a dark match, I don’t know. So, say call time is 1 pm, everything’s fine. I’m just in catering. Around 3 pm, I hear Chris Benoit hasn’t showed up, and if he doesn’t show up, I might need to fill in or something. Okay, sure he’ll be there though, it’s Chris. 4:30, 5 pm, me and Mordecai, Kevin Thorne, get called into talent relations, the two of us, and we’re told, ‘Hey, can’t get hold of Chris Benoit. He’s not here, and if he’s not here in another hour or two, it’s going to be one of you two guys versus CM Punk. We don’t want to let the crowd down by having the replacement lose. So whoever it is between you two is gonna win.’ So kind of like both looked at each other like, I hope it’s me.”

How do they determine who was gonna be that?

“I don’t know who made that decision with that call, but I’d had a lot more TV time consistently than he had up to that point. Whoever made that decision? Thank you. I agree. Good call. So we have that talk, and then I spend the next two hours pacing, hoping that Chris Benoit does not show up. Walked out to the parking garage a couple of times, just to see if I saw a car coming. I didn’t. Then the pay-per-view started, put my tights on. The whole time I’m like, Oh my God, Chris Benoit is gonna show up, and this is gonna get squashed, and I’ll just be back to business as normal. He doesn’t show up, though, and we have the match. I wrestle CM Punk. It was a great match, Punk and I had several after that, leading to eventually the two of us having great chemistry. The first couple were a little clunky, but still fun. So I win the ECW Championship, and it was one of those. This morning, I thought I was just coming to this pay-per-view to eat catering and hang out, didn’t really have anything going on TV storyline-wise. To tonight, now ECW World Champion, the writers are all asking me questions. They’re going to start writing the show around me and, holy crap, this is the best night ever. Then the next day, we get the news about Benoit and what happened. I felt like crap. I felt so guilty just for being happy with something that came to be because of the tragedy we’ve heard about and talked about ad nauseum. It’s still tough for me to be happy about how everything came about. I’m happy that I got that match and my career took a huge turn upwards because of everything. It’s just a very confusing thing to benefit from a tragedy, even if you really had nothing to do with it. Because up to that point, as far as I knew, I thought Chris and his family were just very nice people, you know, and Chris I thought was nice to a point. He always liked me, I think, and respected me, because he could tell that I liked wrestling and that’s what I was there for, but he was one of the guys that was kind of going to weed you out if he didn’t like you, or if anyone thought you had an attitude problem, you’re gonna have to deal with him. I kind of felt like it was cool that he saw me in regard to the fact that I did like wrestling then, I like wrestling now, more than that, I loved it, and I still love it. And as mentioned, confusing, like talking in circles about it.” 

Does it feel like your world title victory is a little tainted, because now you’re the footnote of this tragedy?

“I’ve never thought about it in those terms. The only thing that I think about is I feel guilty about being so happy and excited because I didn’t know what had happened. I don’t care if it’s a footnote or not. What happened after it is more meaningful to me anyway.”

Where do you feel like that could have taken you because you’re World Champion. One of the words that’s always attached to you is underrated. Do you feel like there was a chance later on, to become a world champion?

“I mean, you can say what you want about this, but to this day, I still feel like I could be world champion of WWE one day, maybe AEW. I feel like I just need another opportunity. The way wrestling works, in my mind is things come in waves. Might have mentioned that to you before, but you ride a wave for a while, and then it passes and you’re kind of waiting for the next wave. Sometimes you’re waiting longer than other times, but when waves come and you catch them, they take you places, and like the ECW Heavyweight Championship win for me was like the first huge wave that I caught, and it led me to some really amazing places, and it could have ended up leading me to become a world champion on Raw or SmackDown, or it could have just completely backfired and like, something else weird happened and then led to nothing. So I’m kind of happy with how things turned out, and don’t what if? Anyone watching this, don’t What if?”

Who’s on the list of people you haven’t worked with yet in AEW that you can’t wait to get in there with? 

“A ton of people, and so some of these people maybe have worked with in like a trios or a scramble or a battle royal, but I mean, Mike Bailey, Kevin Knight, Kenny Omega, Jon Moxley.”

I think it’s fair to say that you were the most successful Tough Enough winner of all time. Miz, I think is the most successful tough enough contestant.

“He came in second, though.”

He didn’t win. But what a career:

“The irony, I have thought about this too, if I didn’t win Tough Enough, I feel like my career is totally different if I had won, if Miz did win Tough Enough, same, I don’t know if he makes it as the Tough Enough winner, especially because his year, I think, was it a $250,000 Tough Enough? So I remember at OVW, when I got there with my Tough Enough contracts, which is $50,000 a year, basically a grand a week showing up to OVW, and there are people like Rob Conway and the Bashams and Nick Dinsmore who had been there for years, and they were on $500 a week, or $250 a week. Conway had been there for years, and most of it, he worked part-time as a furniture mover and installer, in addition to the training. So there’s people there making that much money. There’s people there with years of experience that are just there on their own dime. I walked in with this contract and TV and got beat up, and I deserved it. That’s kind of what I feel like shopping to everyone who wants to get into pro wrestling. There’s a part of it where you pay your dues. But [Daniel] Puder had just won $250,000 and he drove up the first day to OVW in a brand new Mercedes, designer sunglasses, kind of locked his car and just walked in with a little bit of swagger. I thought to myself, Oh no, he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it at all. And it didn’t work out for him for a lot of reasons. But Miz has this natural thing about him to rub people the wrong way or be annoying or unlikable, that, if he had won Tough Enough. I mean, even coming in second, he went to Deep South, fought and worked his way up and got bullied and bullied and bullied and bullied and kicked out of the locker room. We’ve all heard that story. What if he’d won? How much worse would it have been for him? I don’t think that The Miz would ever have quit wrestling. I truly believe that from the time he was a kid, there was something in his heart and soul that told him I’m going to be a professional wrestler. So even when he was on the Real World, we saw what he kept saying on all his shows back then, was he wanted to be in the WWE but the difference is just him having to overcome, not winning, and work his way up, I think, was more palatable to the rest of the locker room than if he had won and been given, a good position, like he already rub people the wrong way. It might have rubbed people too far.”

You were the first one to have a real crazy Elimination Chamber spot. How did you dream this up?

“I wouldn’t say growing up, but high school, college, I was watching the Chambers, always thought they were cool. When I got signed, and I was in OVW, Louisville, I started watching more closely. Then I saw that parkour movie, District 13, and started doing parkour a bunch, and I hadn’t been in a Chamber match. Then I started watching parkour and Chamber matches, and in my head, booking all these crazy things that I could potentially do in the Chamber and this is like two years before I had my first Chamber match. So when I knew that I was going to be in the Chamber match, I had like 10 ideas of different kinds of crazy things that I wanted to do, ready to go.”

That’s high when you’re up there!

“It’s so high! The one where I crawled up to the top and then dropped down on Sheamus. It’s funny. When you’re up there and you’re dropping, it feels like you’re three stories up. It doesn’t look like that on TV. It’s not that high, but it feels that high. It’s also when you’re falling backward, you just have to have a lot of trust in what’s behind you. I know Sheamus. I trust the hell out of that guy. He would always be there to catch you, pick you up, and then just hit you in the face with his fist.”

You were in the Elimination Chamber match where the Undertaker got burned on the way to the ring.

“Yes. Everyone’s heard this story now, about Taker’s pyro being let off a little bit too soon, and his jacket being engulfed, and he had to take his jacket off. So I was in the pod, and I was watching everyone’s entrances. I was in my pod, it’s locked, my coat off, and I was like, trying to look cool. Taker’s entrance hits, and it’s the stoic, you know, here he comes, slowly walking. I see the flames go off on the ramp, he’s standing right in the middle of them. I thought that’s so cool until I was like, Ooh, he’s on fire. Then I see him take his jacket off, throw it down, and then take a few steps quickly, and look around, then back to character. I don’t know if it’s really true or not, but I feel like I saw his face change from just The Undertaker walk to just being seethingly angry, and rightfully so, he just got burned in front of a room full of people with pyro that was botched by the guy who had the fire.

After the pyro went off and Taker got on fire, the pyro guy took his headset off and just ran and never came back. After the match, Taker ran back to look for him, and he’d been gone for like a half hour. He never came back to work. But back to the other part of the story. So now seethingly angry Undertaker, who was just set on fire and put his jacket out and threw it down, never seen the man break character, is walking to the chamber, and he’s getting into his pod. I’m thinking I got 5 or 10 minutes in there with that man, and he looks so angry. Are we gonna wrestle, or what’s gonna happen? I was kind of like looking at Rey, who was in one of the pods too, and looking around, and everyone in the pods was all kind of looking at Taker and then looking at each other. I looked at Taker, and he was looking around, still mad, but he started doing this sort of licking his lips really weirdly. Then I start going, What the hell is going on? I stopped and I said, I bet he burnt his mouth and his mustache and his face, and he’s trying to wet his lips, because they’re dry. The match is going and I think when my pod opened he might have been in there already. I was terrified when I got in there with him. Nothing but the most professional, solid guy was there in the ring performing. That’s him, and kind of a nervous, younger dude, that was me, but fantastic. I was gonna talk to him after match and thank him, but I couldn’t find him because he was running around the parking lot looking for the pyro guy. I don’t know what he would have done if he found him.”

I read that you are on your 34th name right now. Does that sound accurate? 

“It sounds accurate, if not underrated. I feel like there’s a handful of names that I’ve [used once]. Johnny Zero, when I wrestled for Below Zero Wrestling in North Dakota for one show. There’s a ton of those one-show names that I’ve had.”

They didn’t do enough with Johnny Drip Drip:

“First of all, Taya hates Johnny Drip Drip. She just does not like the word moist. Most of Johnny Drip Drip’s sayings are based on the fact that Taya hates hearing moist. So America’s Moist Wanted, the Most Moist-See Superstar, I made the choice to be moist. Got the moist voice. Then at some point I realized maybe I went too far. She’s not like Haha Funny. She’s like, No, seriously, don’t say that.”

What is John Morrison grateful for?

“Season 2 of Johnny Loves Taya, for Taya and everyone in the wrestling business.”

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