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Alex Shelley On Working With Kevin Nash In TNA: I Was So Lucky To Have His Mentorship

Originally posted on Wrestlezone
By Jayakrishna Dasappan | Last updated 5/16/24

One of the most popular segments in TNA Wrestling was the Paparazzi Production series involving Former TNA star Alex Shelley and WWE Hall of Famer Kevin Nash. During a recent interview with Mark O’Brien for WrestleMobs/Bodyslam.net, Alex Shelley opened up about his experience working with a legend such as Kevin Nash.

“I got a call to come back to TNA, and I thought to myself, okay let’s learn from my mistakes the first time around. But now I’m going to wrestle the way I want to wrestle. And I’m going to do what I want to do. Because I tried to listen to people the first time, just didn’t work. And I didn’t feel good about it right? It just didn’t feel right to me. But now, I’ve been able to cut my teeth and started growing in Japan. And in the meantime I’m wrestling for Ring of Honor, I’m wrestling for CZW, I’m doing the higher-end tournaments like the Super Eight, I had a WWE tryout.

“So it’s going well. And that was when I really started to realize, okay, I can do this. I got this now. When they put me with Kevin though, that was again a moment where you’re awe-struck. But just for a second. ‘Okay, wow, like Kevin Nash.’ And this is a guy who I had learned so much from some of the veterans prior. I’d already named Steamboat, Tracey Smothers, and Sabu, and Scott too. But Kevin Nash is a guy who’s been in Adam Sandler movies. A guy who was instrumental in the Monday Night Wars. And they wanted me to go back-and-forth with him verbally. Okay, I guess they put me in the spot for a reason. but what I lucked into was a situation where we’re both from Detroit.

Kevin Nash and Alex Shelley had similar upbringings

“We both had the angry Mid-Western roots within us. We both grew up in the same areas, and we both had similar upbringings. And that commonality made it a lot easier for me. So right out of the rip after we filmed our first few Paparazzi productions series together, it was like, ‘Oh man! This was super fun.’ And Kevin said, ‘You know they wanted me to treat you like my young boy. You can be my young boy but I’m not going to treat you like that.’ And I was so lucky to have his mentorship for a year. He never treated me as anything less than… to some extent an equal… As far as the character work went.

“And that was massively beneficial for me. Because of that, we got a better output. People still talk about those things today. And I’m so proud of the fact that — and Kevin contested this — none of this was written for us. Per se, right, they would create these overreaching situations, but the verbage, for the most part, was just Kevin and I riffing, and Jeremy Borash had a huge hand in that, too. Outside the three of us though, like nothing was written down. There was no script, nothing. It was just us. And I love that part of it,” Alex Shelley said.

Did you enjoy the Paparazzi Productions series?

This article first appeared on Wrestlezone and was syndicated with permission.

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