Chris Jericho discusses Dynamite on the 'Jericho Cruise', Marko Stunt, wrestling Cody at Full Gear and Randy Orton using AEW as leverage (Exclusive)

Chris Jericho Vs Cody Rhodes

This brings me to you and Cody at Full Gear. Are you looking forward to wrestling someone like Cody who’s a big player in the company, a big player in the industry and it’s for a major title. What are your thoughts going into that?

Jericho: He is a big player in the industry and a big player in the company but he’s not bigger than I am in the industry, so yeah. Cody’s great, he’s doing a great job, he’s one of the most popular performers in the company right now. He’s won a lot of matches, he knows what he’s doing, he knows how to get himself over and so do so I think that’s one of the reasons why in the first four weeks Cody is probably one of the most popular, if not the most popular angle on the show because you’ve got two guys who know exactly what to do with the TV time we have to get over to the max.

It’s not necessarily what happens inside the ring, it’s outside the ring, and we’ve been building it perfectly. So, it’s going to be huge, it’s going to be a huge match for us, basically our first official PPV, the first official defence of the AEW Championship with the golden child, entitled Cody Rhodes against ‘Le Champion’ Chris Jericho.

So, I think we’ve built the story amazingly, like you mentioned last week on the show [two weeks ago now] was one of the favourite things I’ve ever done, I think next to the Festival of Friendship it’s probably the best thing I’ve been involved with in the last three or four years outside the ring, as far as not having a match.

Obviously we knew what we were doing but the exact lines and every little twist was not rehearsed and planned out and that’s why it worked. So, I think you’re going to have a lot more of that between Jericho and Cody. I know we’re both excited about the match and excited we still have another couple of weeks to try and build this thing. We’re on a roll and it’s a good time to be involved with this, it’s a good time to be sampling and becoming an AEW hardcore fan for sure!

You mentioned ‘Le Champion’, are there are any plans to bring out a t-shirt for that because I know that at the moment you have a knack for saying things that become t-shirts?

Jericho: It’s just one of those things where I looked at the social media presence to see what people are excited about and ‘I’ve got a ticket’ seemed to be a thing that everyone was really into so let’s put out a shirt, see how it does and if it you sell 1,000 units in a week you move on to the next one.

I think ‘Le Champion’ is one that you would spend some time with. The Bubbly shirts are still super popular, those are the ones that are in arenas, those are the ones that are moving very well so you don’t want to step on that. The ticket one is kind of a side-bar, we knew it wasn’t going to be a massive seller for weeks and months to come. It might be, but I think something like ‘A little bit of the bubbly’ is and once that starts going down we’ll look at doing another major shirt like ‘Le Champion’.

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Next: It would be a sin if I didn't ask for Jericho's thoughts on 'A little bit of the bubbly' and he shares them!