When Will Ospreay was 14, his mum bought him a wrestling ring. It’s a move that played out as well in the long term as it did the short, because by his own admission, he was in urgent need of occupying at the time.
“She knew I was a troublemaker,” he smiles. “I was a little shit. I just wanted to find something to entertain myself, especially at that age, and obviously, I loved wrestling.” His mum worked in an amateur drama group and happened to know some fabricators and welders, so they did their best to put together a ring, guided only by a vague idea of what it should look like. “Wrestling rings are meant to have individual beams. This was a giant metal thing with a spring on top of it,” he laughs. Still, Ospreay says he gets the same feeling stepping into an AEW ring as a 33- year-old man as he did stepping into that makeshift metal one when he was 14. “I’m completely blessed,” he nods.
“This is something that I’ve wanted to do – and longed for – for such a long time, and I thought it was impossible because of where I’m from. So many people from our country that were presented in American TV wrestling were like, jokes. They were never the main guy, they were never looked upon as the best.”
To his point, when he first joined AEW in 2023, a lot of his presentation – the North Face jackets, tracksuits and the occasional perm – seemed to baffle American audiences because it was so loudly British. His geezery charm won them over anyway, and since being an on-screen regular, he’s introduced them to such staples as: Gavin and Stacey, Cillit Bang mascot Barry Scott, and Nandos.
It’s not inconceivable that right now, there are probably people walking around somewhere like Wisconsin with shirts that say, “Bruv”, which he punctuates sentences with as if the word were a full stop. Essentially, if I had to describe him to someone with no clue who he was, I’d say he’s like the lovechild of AJ Styles and Danny Dyer.
“The UK fans understand my personality, they understand I’m a very cheeky person,” he says. In fact, he’s so excited by the prospect of being back in front of them next month that he’s currently mulling over ways to work lines from an old M&S advert into a promo. But what he really wants to do is get The Inbetweeners’ James Buckley to come down and call someone a bus wanker at one of the shows. Main eventing Wembley Stadium? Completed it mate.
“I mean, my humour sometimes translates wrong even to the people in my country,” he admits. “But the best way that I can show authenticity is by being me.” A far cry from everyone’s initial fears that he was going to say c*nt live on air, it’s been jokes about his sex life that have proved divisive of late, particularly after he made a quip about “smashing the life” out of his now-wife, Alex Windsor. He says he can skirt a certain line – and the accent certainly gets him out of trouble – but he’s not out to offend.
“I grew up on building sites, and I grew up around geezers and men, and trust me, I hate it,” he says, adding: “I like spray tans,” by way of explanation.
He is definitely a departure from what you might call a more old school, American vision of what a wrestler should be. Ospreay presents a different kind of masculinity: he’s imbued with a boyish sense of optimism that’s easy to root for, he’s cheeky, sometimes impulsive, and surprisingly earnest about his need for guidance.
Since enlisting the help of Death Riders, they’ve set about instilling a steely brutality in him ahead of his match against Kenny Omega at Wembley, which has been perplexing to watch, given they were the ones who wrote him off last time AEW was in London.
“The moment that bell rings, it’s life or death,” he says. “My life got taken away from me when my neck got snapped. It’s a painful lesson to be able to put that to one side and accept help in becoming more vicious, [and] in becoming the guy that I need to be to become a world champion. It’s about having faith and confidence in myself. I didn’t have that, and being honest with you, being a part of the Death Riders gives me a lot of confidence.”
And, he says, their training is working. Much of it seems to be about instilling unflinching violence in him, and stamping out his hesitation to pull out moves like the Tiger Driver ‘91, which you have to wonder if he’s capable of hitting Omega with, especially given he, like Ospreay, came back from a career-threatening setback after suffering a near-fatal bout of diverticulitis.
“I’d hit it on Kenny before, but our relationship back then was very volatile,” he says. As he sees it, when Omega left New Japan, he’d passed the torch to him, which came with too many unspoken pressures. “I thought instead of being the next Kenny, I’ll just be the first me. And I put my flag in the ground: This is the style that I want to do, this is how I want to be presented.
“I would say there was a part of him that was jealous of me at that time, because maybe he wasn’t happy with himself. And there was a part of me that was so braggadocious that I genuinely thought, at that point, I was the best thing in the world.
“The first time we ever wrestled one another, he merked me. I’ve never felt more embarrassed in my life, and it kind of fuelled this anger, and this emotion that came out of me. I just wanted revenge, and it didn’t matter if it was my hero or not.”
He says any hesitation he might have shown before has pretty much been beaten out of him by Jon Moxley. “There’s a friendship and a love there, but when it comes to pulling the trigger, I’ll do the right thing when it comes to it.”
When Ospreay was first coming up, he felt there were literal oceans standing between him and the best in the world, and as far as he could tell, it was only American, Japanese and Canadian wrestlers who made up the best of the best.
“I just wanted to become that so bad,” he says. “It was something that just drove me constantly, and I’m about to wrestle in the cathedral of football, in the main event, flying the flag for the most important championship in all of wrestling. I genuinely do believe the best in the world has come from this country, and I believe that I can be on top for years to come.”
He wants the changes that would come with it too, to feel the weight and responsibility of carrying that belt. “I want my life to change,” he insists. “Every time I’ve been in the main event of a pay-per-view for AEW, I’ve felt at home. I’ve felt in the right place. I know that championship is almost like a guaranteed main event spot, constantly. It’s what I live for, it’s what I thrive for, I love the competition. I love having dogs sniffing at my neck wanting to bite.” Ahead of All In, he says he wants “every bit of competition physically possible”.
Before there was a Wembley to main event, or even an AEW to speak of, there were the years spent backyard wrestling, then on the British independents, and then in Japan, which was a foundational period for Ospreay both in and outside the ring.
“Back in 2019, I moved to Japan as a foreigner. I had a girlfriend at the time, but I felt very isolated,” he says. He had too much time to ruminate and obsess over his “mistakes and immaturity”, and sensed something wasn’t right. When he started talking to his doctor about it, they batted around a few possible diagnoses – one thought it was depression, another thought it might be insomnia – before he asked if he could get tested for ADHD.
After a lot of back and forth on Zoom with doctors in England and Japan, he eventually took a test and was formally diagnosed. “It gave me clarity and an understanding of what I was going through, why I was so hyperactive and not in control of my emotions whatsoever,” Ospreay says. “I’d have some really good days where I would lock in to the job, and then there’d be days where I would just shoot myself in the foot – publicly as well.”
He still struggles with it now, but it’s better managed, and he’s found it to be a massive benefit to his creativity. “I’ve used this to really help my wrestling,” he says. “But it’s a blessing and a curse.”
He’s about to launch into a diatribe about how it works in his favour in the ring, and he’s suddenly animated, telling me about all the split-second decisions he’s able to make. “Like, the amount of times I’m in a ring,” he begins, but trails off and retreats into himself, apologising for getting overenthusiastic. That impulse to cut himself off seems like a reaction he’s beaten into himself.
He brightens up at the mention of Callum Newman, whose success in New Japan highlights the path Ospreay has been able to pave for British wrestlers looking to make a name for themselves internationally, untouched by the WWE system.
As a teenager, Newman had gone to one of Ospreay’s training seminars, and had told him he was about to quit. “I was like, ‘Whoa,’” Ospreay says. “I pulled him and his mum to one side, and I was like: ‘Don’t let him quit, he’s got talent. He’s really good.’ I was able to get him into New Japan. I was able to shift some things around so he would get the opportunity, but he had to work for it himself. You don’t become the IWGP heavyweight champion with handouts from your big brother. You have to work for it.
“I got brought in as a talent, he got brought in as a young boy, and it’s very, very different. You’re in the dojo, you’re learning their way of life and their way of doing it, and it’s very brutal and hard on the body.
“All I ever wanted to do was to raise the people around me, and Callum is a very special one for me, ’cause I’ve known him since he was 15 years old. The only thing that I’ve ever wanted to do is create a road for British wrestlers to walk on.”
Likewise, he’s unabashedly proud when conversation turns to his family, practically beaming when he talks about the way he and Windsor balance wrestling with mundane joys like the school run, and he somehow manages to make their insane weekly flights to the US sound like a delight.
“Because me and the missus are in the same boat now, we travel together,” he says. “It’s one of my favourite things to do. We’re sat next to one another, we get a little tray out and play Mario Kart.” When I ask just how many hours of travel that requires, he happily obliges.
“Let’s have a butch,” he says, whipping out his phone to reveal that this year alone, he’s taken 65 flights, spent over 16 days in the air, and lost 25 hours to delays in the process. You get the sense he’s incredibly proud of the way he’s been able to remain in the UK to give their son a sense of normality.
“I’ve got a great sport system, and it’s always good to remember that there’s your real world, and there’s the fictional world. My real world is my wife and my kid,” he says. “He’s my soul, he’s my joy, he is everything that I’ve ever wanted out of a son. I just don’t want to let him down.” Forget the immense pressure of performing in front of his country for a world championship, he’s also got kids at his son’s school to impress now too. He distinctly remembers discovering that they watched wrestling after he came home from a brutal steel cage match against Kyle Fletcher.
With his head still bandaged, he was limping behind his son while he and his friends raced to the gate after school. “I’m walking like I’ve been riding a horse for days – like waddling,” he says. As he lagged behind, he caught one of the boys whisper the words “cage match”, to which his son, somewhat embarrassed, said: “Guys, this is my dad. Can we not?” Wrestling comes with its own unique highs, the fancy flights and the fans screaming your name – but there’s no reality check quite like an uninterested kid.
“I don’t know if he understands that it’s not normal to have 10,000 people in an arena chanting your name,” Ospreay laughs. “I don’t know if he fully grasps that yet. But I think maybe when we get a new house, I can put a ring in there.
“Hopefully, one of these days, he’ll say, ‘Can I give it a go?”
Tickets for AEW All In London at Wembley Stadium on 30th August are available fromLiveNation.co.uk