Back in 2015, ESPN’s documentary series E:60 semi-pulled back the curtain on NXT.
The series focused on showcasing NXT wrestlers in different phases of their career.Xavier Woods, Corey Graves, Adam Rose, Tyler Breeze and then Colin Cassidy/Big Cass, now W. Morrissey, were all highlighted in the series.
Tyler Breeze, in an episode of Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions, mentioned that he was supposed to be fired as a part of the series.
During the interview, Breeze had this to say, “We were doing a thing with ESPN, it was E:60 and it was on Woods, Leo Kruger [Adam Rose], Colin Cassidy [Big Cass, W. Morrissey], myself and Corey Graves. We were told at the time that we were doing a cool E:60 piece on the five of us. ‘Cool, awesome, great.’ As we were filming it is when I started to transition into Tyler Breeze. They got the whole transition to my debut. Triple H tells us at the end of one of those meetings that the E:60 thing we were doing was supposed to have a couple guys who made it, a couple guys we don’t know and a couple guys who got fired. Me and Big Cass were supposed to be the two that got fired.” (h/t Jeremy Lambert of Fightful)
Breeze continued, “During that time, I found Tyler Breeze and he found his thing with Enzo [Amore] and it completely 180’d to where, ‘No, we can’t fire these guys, they’re doing good now.’ He said this in front of everybody for the first time and we went, ‘Oh my God. The thing we were excited about we were going to get fired at the end of?’ We had no idea. Fortunately for me and Cass, we found something that saved us, a common pattern. I debuted (the character) and everyone was like, ‘Okay, cool, there’s something here.’ They’d book me in matches where the crowd was learning who I was and they started to get into it but I was never going towards the NXT Title or being ‘the guy’ or towards a big babyface turn. The first test, because they were like ‘it’s a cool gimmick, he takes pictures, he wrestles a bit, and away we go, let’s see if there’s any substance to it.’ I had a match with Sami Zayn at the first TakeOver and after that, Triple H pulled me aside and said, ‘Kevin Dunn called, he said he loves the Tyler Breeze character. Vince also saw it and he likes the character. This was the proving point that there is more to Tyler Breeze than the gimmick. Now you can have a match and we can do something with this.’ Then I worked with everyone coming in that they were going to go with. It wasn’t so much a push as to now I proved that I could be a reliable guy. You can toss me in there with whoever and we can make them look really good. Triple H said it a couple of times, ‘There’s a certain quality some guys have and some guys don’t. You can lift people up to a certain level without bringing yourself down to a different level. You keep yourself a star while bringing them up to a star level.’ Obviously, if you’re introducing somebody like a Finn or a KENTA, that’s a huge thing because the first impression of a new person, we need to make sure we knock it out of the park if we’re going with them. You need a gatekeeper to be like, ‘Welcome, here’s what we can do.'”
In October 2015, Tyler Breeze was then called up to the main roster after losing to Apollo Crews in a singles match at NXT TakeOver: Respect.
Throughout the rest of the interview, Breeze discussed his future plans for wrestling and otherwise.