Few have had as great a year on the black and gold brand as NXT‘s Candice LeRae, and the future is looking just as bright. LeRae’s cemented her place this year as one of the top stars on an already stacked Women’s Division, transformed her character, and most recently led her team to a victory at TakeOver WarGames. Now she’s celebrating the holiday season with a Gargano Christmas taking over tonight’s episode of NXT, and ComicBook.com had the chance to talk to LeRae about all of it as well as the family’s newest additions Indi Hartwell and Austin Theory, what she thought of The Mandalorian’s season finale, and that amazing Ahsoka moment!
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First though it was time to talk a little Gargano Christmas, and LeRae promises some amazing gifts for Indi Hartwell and Austin Theory as part of the celebration.
“Well, it’s our first Christmas as a family with Indi and with Austin, so we want to do something really special for them for the holidays,” LeRae said. “I’ll say that we have some gifts to give them. Not going to spoil these gifts, but we do have some gifts for them and we’ve just gone all out for them. We want them to feel special. I even baked cookies.”
Speaking of gifts, the crew has already set the bar quite high with the Shotzi Blackheart themed trophy they presented LeRae, and you might be surprised at who came up with it.
“I’m trying to think of who actually came up with it. I don’t know. I just showed up and Johnny was like, ‘Oh, there’s just a trophy for you.’ I don’t actually know who’s… I feel like this has got to be, it sounds like… Gosh, I don’t even know. I’m going to say Shawn Michaels did. Even if it wasn’t his idea, I’m going to say it’s his idea. I think he gives Johnny and everybody else some good ideas,” LeRae said. As for if the new gifts will rival those, LeRae is pretty confident, saying “They’re pretty good. They’re pretty good.”
As for Hartwell and Theory joining the family, LeRae couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with them and helping to shape them into the stars they can become.
“I love getting to work with younger talent, and I know Johnny does too,” LeRae said. “And I love getting to see ideas spark in them and see the potential. It’s just so exciting, and you get to… I don’t know. I feel like we have this dough that we get to form into whatever kind of cookies we want, and then they’re just going to turn into these beautiful things that everybody wants. It’s really exciting. I love it.”
Last week the group revealed their new name, The Way, and many fans instantly saw the connection to Star Wars’ The Mandalorian, which both are a huge fan of. That said, it also organically fits with what they had already been building towards as part of their journey through NXT, so it’s a win-win.
“We kept talking about the Gargano way, we need to do things this way, we need to do it the right way, the Gargano way, and there were a few times even where even just voiceover stuff, I was like, ‘I’m going to make sure that I say the Gargano way every other soundbite that I do so that this is going to be in there at least once. It’s going to make a cut of this.’ We were so passionate about it. Johnny even had it on his gear,” LeRae said.
“We were passionate about saying that we needed to do things a different way and our way, and obviously we were so inspired by The Mandalorian and this is the way, and eventually, when we were coming up with names, there were a few different names thrown to us and some of them were okay, some of them… there was always a reason not to use one, but then when The Way came about, because obviously, we don’t want it to necessarily just be The Gargano Way because it’s my way too. We can’t leave me out. My last name, yeah I took his name but I am still Candice LeRae, so we can’t do things just his way. Now, when we took out the Gargano and it was just The Way, we were like, ‘Well that’s it. That’s the one.’”
Then it was a matter of getting it cleared, and through that process, we learned that the Mandalorian craze might have completely missed Shawn Michaels.
“We were crossing our fingers. We were going, ‘Hopefully, this clears and everybody’s okay with it and we don’t get told that, ‘Oh, no, the Mandalorian, you guys can’t do that.’ Because I feel like some people here might not have realized that that was kind of what we were going for. So maybe. I think even Johnny said that Shawn Michaels ran up to him the other day and said, ‘Hey, so my wife said that there’s this show, the Mandalorian.’ And Johnny was like, ‘I guess Shawn has lived under a rock for a little bit, or he’s been so obsessed with work that he just missed it.’
Before moving on we had to know what Christmas movies LeRae watched, both those expected over the holidays and ones that some would raise an eyebrow to. For me, that’s Sleepless in Seattle, and for LeRae it is Die Hard, though it also came to light that somehow Johnny has not seen Die Hard.
“Oh, that’s really a tricky question because I’m such a Christmas nut that I’m like, ‘Okay, I have to watch all my Christmas stuff now. I got to get White Christmas and Frosty. I’m trying to think if there’s a… because I feel like if I go with the hot take of Die Hard not being a Christmas movie then I’m going to get attacked here. But I will say, if I can convince Johnny that it is a Christmas movie, then maybe I can finally get him to watch it.”
Yes, I gasped a bit when I heard that, and LeRae can’t believe it either. “I know. I know. What you’re thinking right now, I know. It’s upsetting. I can’t… It shocks me. To my core, I don’t understand because I love Die Hard, all the Die Hards. I love Bruce Willis, and ironically, actually, a few of Johnny’s favorite movies have Bruce Willis in it, and I’m like, ‘But you haven’t seen Die Hard?’”
Johnny not seeing Die Hard is just crazy, though you could say LeRae driving over Shotzi Blackheart’s tank with a truck was equally crazy. It’s something she didn’t expect to do, but once the opportunity came around she was more than up for it.
“Actually, when they told me I was going to get to do that, I was really pumped because it’s not something that I would have thought for my character and I think that that’s what’s really, I don’t know, it’s been different for me because I always sat there going, ‘Okay, I think this is what people want,’ and then after a while I was like, ‘I’m just going to do what I feel comfortable doing,’ and then people will let me know their interpretation of this. So when they’re like, ‘We think you would do something like this,’ I’m like, ‘This is great. I love this. Let’s all come up with these fun ideas of what I am and mush them together.’ It’s so fun for me because I feel like not as much pressure on me to come up with everything like my character would do this and my character would do that, because now I’m getting these interpretations,” LeRae said. “It’s great.”
LeRae led her team to a victory at WarGames recently, and while she is incredibly proud of what they accomplished, she does admit to feeling more a bit more pressure being the last out of the pod as opposed to the first.
“Honestly, me last year being first, I thought, ‘Oh, this is so much pressure because I’m in here from the start of this match until it ends,” LeRae said. “I’m in this. I am very committed to this match.’ But then being the last one out of my pod was maybe more stressful for me because I don’t even like being the last to enter a ring. In a match, if I’m the last person out, it drives me crazy, because I’m such a like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s do this.’ Just standing in this cage and watching the girls from afar and just going, ‘I can’t help anybody, I can’t do anything,’ and just watching time tick down and going, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s still four more girls that got to get out of this thing?’ That to me was the hardest part. The anticipation is the worst, the absolute worst.”
Now, of course, we had to talk some Mandalorian, and while LeRae was already an Ahsoka Tano fan, the episode might have hooked a brand new fan as well.
“It’s been so cool. I had a realization the other day when we were watching the finale, I was like, ‘Man, this is just a really great season for awesome women.’ It was so cool to watch. The day that we watched the Ahsoka episode, actually, I was with my family, and my six-year-old niece had come in the room and I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure she doesn’t really watch any of this.’ She lives in her own little world, but she comes in and she started watching it because Ahsoka was on screen, and she was just so mesmerized by her,” LeRae said. “She full-on sat down next to me, she grabbed her little stuffed animal and just curled up and just watched the whole rest of the episode. I was like, ‘That is amazing.’ She’s being impacted by this right now and that is so cool.”
Speaking of Ahsoka, LeRae already debuted some amazing Ahsoka themed gear, but with Royal Rumble coming up, we had to ask if she could tease any new gear if she happens to enter the ring during the event, and Ghostbusters fans might be in luck.
“Oh my gosh. You just started something in my brain. I’m like, ‘Ooh.’ I don’t know. I’m trying to think of what I even have,” LeRae said. “I will say that for Halloween I was going to be Gozer, but Johnny did not have a character to be with Gozer, so maybe I just have to go the Gozer route and finally do that.”
That Gozer themed gear should not go to waste, and LeRae agrees. “It can’t. It’s so good,” LeRae said.
Hopefully, we’ll see LeRae at the Royal Rumble in full Gozer gear, but in the meantime, you can catch LeRae and The Way tonight in A Very Gargano Christmas Special on USA Network at 8 PM EST.
You can follow our coverage of NXT right here on ComicBook.com and as always you can talk all things NXT and Christmas with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!
