Bayley Describes Having Fun With Wrestling in Front of No Crowd at the WWE Performance Center

WWE was entering uncharted territory when the March 13 episode of Friday Night SmackDown arrived. The coronavirus pandemic was picking up steam, the company’s live events schedule was being scrapped, WrestleMania 36‘s plans were looking more precarious by the day and the Blue Brand had been moved from its planned location in Detroit to an empty WWE Performance Center down in Orlando. After an introduction from Triple H, the show kicked off with Bayley, Sasha Banks, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross competing in a tag team match. The reigning SmackDown Women’s Champion admitted she had no idea what it was going to b like, since the staple of every wrestling match — the crowd — was now gone.

So she decided to have fun with it.

“When we first made our entrance I was thinking in my head, ‘Who do I look at and where do I go to?’ And then we just played it up as if it was funny that nobody was there and we’re so into each other, so into ourselves that it didn’t matter,” Bayley said in a new interview with ComicBook.com this week. “And the more we went on got into the match, I actually did really start having fun and getting into it because I have my best friend there with me, we can just be idiots together. Then it didn’t really matter and we just had to remember that there’s millions of people watching on the camera.”

Bayley saw those first few episodes of SmackDown and Raw as practice runs for WrestleMania 36, which aired on both Saturday and Sunday via tape delay from the PC. She said a key conversation with Daniel Bryan and John Cena backstage helped her get in the right mindset for her five-way championship match.

“At first I didn’t really know how I was going to get my adrenaline level up, how I was going to have as much fun, but I actually had a conversation with Daniel Bryan and at the same time, [John] Cena had walked in,” she explained. “We started talking about how we’re going to do this in front of nobody, and we all just kind of took it as a new experience to learn and something to take advantage of. Because if you look at it like, ‘Man, this is going to suck and it’s going to hurt so much more,’ then, of course it’s going to suck.

“So you kind of have to look at it as, ‘Okay, how good am I and can I do it with nobody there and can I really bring it out of me with nobody there?’ And so it’s more like a test,” she continued. “And once I looked at it that way, it felt really cool. It did feel like a good bonding between everybody backstage because we were all there for each other and we knew this was an insane time outside of those doors for the world, but inside the doors to the Performance Center, we were all just pulling for each other.”

One strange aspect of wrestling inside the empty arena? Moves hurt even more.

“In a match, everything that hurts is just kind of like tears, it’s swept away. And you get so into either getting booed or cheered that everything is so worth it, but when it’s just the empty building and you’re just hearing your body slam on the mat, then it hurts a little bit more,” Bayley explained.

The San Jose native successfully retained her SmackDown Women’s Championship in an elimination match against Banks, Lacey Evans, Naomi and Tamina. She’ll look to celebrate that win on this week’s edition of SmackDown, which will begin at 8 p.m. ET on FOX.