Ricochet Recalls Being Courted To Play Prince Puma In Lucha Underground, Why He Agreed

Ricochet played the character of Prince Puma in Lucha Underground, and he recently recalled how hard Konnan pushed for him to take the job. The AEW star played Puma in the El Rey series and was its first promotional champion. He appeared on Wrestling With Freddie and during the discussion he spoke about why he was hesitant for a long time to agree to the role. You can see highlights below, per Fightful:

On Konnan pushing for him to take the rule: “I remember, Konnan, for a while, was trying to get me to play this part in this TV show — Prince Puma — Konnan was calling me and texting me and emailing me for months, maybe even a year, up to a year. I remember a long time, Konnan — I would say months — and he kept calling and sometimes I would hear him and sometimes I wouldn’t even — because he kept pitching this new show. It’s like Mark Burnett and Robert Rodriguez were gonna be executive producers on it. It’s gonna be like a new style of wrestling.”

On his hesitance in taking the part: “He kept trying to pitch it and I kept thinking in my head, like, ‘Wrestling Society X.’ I don’t know if you remember Wrestling Society X on MTV. They had explosions and they had music artists, and it lasted for maybe a season, and I just remember it not getting any traction, and so that’s what I had in my head. It was gonna be something like that, which wasn’t bad. But just at the time, it wasn’t gonna catch on, and so I was just like, ‘Nah, I don’t think so. I’m just gonna wait, I’m just gonna wait, I’m just gonna wait, I’m just gonna wait.’”

On how he agreed to take the role: “One day, I was going out for PWG, and they said, ‘Well, just come out here’ because they were out in LA.’ They said, ‘Come out here, come through the studio, look at the set, look at some of the photos and stuff that we have and we’ll give you the whole rundown and just see what you think,’ and actually, me and Rich Swann at the time, we fly down there — well, for PWG — then we drove down there. And then they showed me The Temple, they showed me the arena, they showed me Dario Cueto and what he was gonna be and Prince Puma and what he was gonna be. And they showed me all the stuff and everything and I said, ‘Honestly, man, this looks cool.’ The art looked cool and The Temple looked cool and everything looked awesome, and I said, ‘They wanted me to be this Prince Puma which is like the main character of the whole thing,’ and I said, ‘Wow, this is crazy’ so, okay, sure, and then we got the talking…”