Two-time WWE Champion The Miz has had his sights set on becoming a WWE Superstar since he was young. Well before signing with the sports entertainment giant, he could be seen portraying his Miz character on MTV’s The Real World when he first appeared as a cast member in 2001.
Despite finding in-ring success as a Grand Slam Champion, The Miz revealed in a recent interview with Off the Beat with Brian Baumgartner that he was initially brought into WWE to work as either a commentator or an announcer. The star insisted that he wanted to be a WWE Superstar instead, and the company allowed him to begin an in-ring career.
“I’ll never forget, they were like, ‘You impressed us so much that maybe there is something for you here.’ They brought me up to Connecticut to commentate. Joey Styles brought me up with Todd Grisham and Michael Cole, they brought me up and I had to do a take of commentating. They told me, ‘we might bring you in as a commentator or interviewer.’
“It was the first time I said, ‘but I want to be a WWE Superstar.’ They didn’t look at me like a WWE Superstar, they looked at me as a personality. I saw something different, ‘I love what you guys do and you do a great job, but I want to be bigger than The Rock and bigger than (Hulk) Hogan. I want to be a Superstar.’ ‘Alright, okay.'”
The Miz Took A Pay Cut To Join WWE
During that same interview, the star of Miz & Mrs. revealed that when he signed his developmental deal, he knew that he would be making less money than he did as a reality television star. However, he said the move was necessary to advance his career.
“They gave me a developmental deal to go down and they didn’t think I was going to be much of anything, to be honest, you could kind of tell, ‘let’s see what we got here.’ They gave me this developmental contract and I was like, ‘I’m making more than this doing Real World and The Challenge. I’m not taking a paycut to do this.’ I had to think about that. Are we looking at this as a career move? Sometimes, you have to take less because you see the big picture. That’s what I did. I took less money to go there, train, and prove everyone wrong.”
h/t Fightful