Darby Allin has discussed the creative input he had for his and Sting’s street fight against Team Taz and the one thing that he was concerned with during the match.
Sting took part in his first match since 2015 when he teamed with Allin at AEW Revolution in March 2021. The duo took part in a cinematic street fight against Team Taz’s Ricky Starks and Brian Cage. Sting won the match for his team after dropping Starks with a Scorpion Death Drop.
Speaking on Drinks With Johnny, TNT Champion Darby Allin discussed how involved he was in the creative process for the match.
Allin explained:
“Sh*t, I don’t know. I was feeling it. We shot that specific scene at three in the morning. I was up all night thinking about the match. All day, I was just getting hype. Cinematic match, you get an adrenaline rush, come down, take a break, reshoot, adrenaline, come down, take a break. Up there, I was like, ‘Alright, let’s jump.’ I’m so used to doing that shit all the time. At that rate, I knew it was the last thing I had to do in the match so I wasn’t going to be walking out, I didn’t care, I was going to lay it on the line.”
Allin also commented that he spends a lot of time in the boiler room alone at AEW shows. He explained that he feels at his most creative in that environment.
Allin then continued:
“I was writing storyboards for months before the PPV. When I saw the location where we were filming, I took all these photos and was plotting everything in my brain. [I was] sitting in the boiler room, just coming up with all the shots. We had an awesome crew and Steve Yu, who helped direct it. When we’re shooting it, I was running around and doing everything possible. ‘I wanna shoot it like this.’ When we got done with the cut, I’d run through a pane of glass, and go, ‘alright, get the next shot.'”
During the filming of the match, only one concern made Allin pause for thought, and that was making sure he didn’t cause harm to his iconic tag team partner:
“I was doing everything and I felt on autopilot. I had an adrenaline rush and felt we could go all night and was on fire with it. The only thing that stopped me was when I had to throw the bat to Sting. I was like, ‘Alright, I’m going to throw this down.’ Tony [Khan] put it best, ‘You know how the laws of physics work, right? That bat is going to come down and we don’t know if it’s going to break Sting’s face.’ First time in the whole shoot I started thinking like, ‘What if I do break Sting’s face and he can’t finish the match?’ He’s the one who was like, ‘I’m catching that bat.’ Perfect catch, first try, beat the f*ck out of everyone. I was on cloud nine.”
Darby Allin noted that Sting showed his gratitude to the twenty-eight-year-old:
“Sting pulled me aside a week after and said, ‘I want to let you know how much this means to me how easy you’ve made this for me.'”
Since then Allin has defended his TNT Title on AEW Dynamite regularly with Sting by his side. Among others, he has defeated John Silver, Scorpio Sky, and Jungle Boy in recent weeks. Allin will next defend his TNT Championship on the 28th of April against Dark Order’s 10.