AEW champ Jon Moxley is on a mission to eradicate complacency: ‘I feel a responsibility to these people’

Jon Moxley is in his fourth reign as AEW Champion. After defeating Bryan Danielson and ending the legend's full-time wrestling career at WrestleDream in October, Moxley’s hostile on-screen takeover of Tony Khan’s wrestling promotion was fully set in motion.

On the surface, it’s a fairly standard wrestling storyline — Moxley and his Death Riders stable turned on their former running mate and have wreaked havoc across the company for several months now. Orange Cassidy, Jay White, "Hangman" Adam Page, Darby Allin and others have all been subject to the various ambushes carried out by Moxley’s crew.

It’s a class of aggression rarely seen in the six-year history of AEW and one that Moxley justifies on camera as needed, as he’s grown unhappy with the nature of AEW’s roster and wants to mold it to his liking. Although the violence has teetered on the edge of gratuitous at times, it's also brought a more cinematic feel to the main-event level in AEW.

“Storytelling is always needed, it’s essential, it’s non-negotiable. It’s a vital element to wrestling,” Moxley tells Uncrowned. “You need a hook. How much more do you enjoy sports when you have an investment in who the person is or the story of the season? Wrestling is no different. You’re not going to pick up a book that has a bunch of descriptions of random objects or events — there has to be a story or a thread that will take you on a ride.”

The next stop on Moxley’s ride comes in a familiar place for him — Cincinnati, Ohio — as he defends the AEW World Championship at Wednesday's "AEW Dynamite" against Powerhouse Hobbs. Not only did Moxley grow up in Cincinnati, he currently lives there with his family and is an active member in the community.

“I’ve always thought Cincinnati was an underserved market as far as wrestling is concerned,” Moxley says. “This city is a great sports town, a great entertainment town, has a ton of wrestling fans and history. It’s a great community that I’m very proud to be a part of. I could literally walk to the show.

“To a lot of people, they might just say, ‘Oh, that’s the guy we see all the time.’ I’m pretty easy to find around here. I don’t want to be one of these guys who moves to a city and are 'part of the community' when the cameras are out but actually live an hour away in a gated community. It’s pretty important to me to show people here that I am in it with them every day. I work out at the [YMCA] downtown. They’ll recognize me, I just might be strangling someone.”

The same way Moxley speaks on behalf of — and is an advocate for — his hometown, he’s also a champion for AEW.

Yes, that may sound repetitive, but the difference between Moxley being AEW champion and being a champion for AEW is about as subtle as the difference between a uranage and a Rock Bottom.

Part of the reason why Moxley’s storyline works so well is that — like any good professional wrestling character or angle — there’s more than a smidge of truth to it. Are Moxley, Claudio Castagnoli, PAC, Wheeler Yuta and Marina Shafir suffocating people backstage and in the streets with plastic bags? No. But the desire to eliminate complacency within AEW is very real, and it goes beyond what we see on "Dynamite," "Collision" or any pay-per-view.

“We’re building. It’s about a lot more than what happens in the ring,” Moxley says. “Building something sustainable for the future that we can take pride in, we’ve been doing that for the past few months.

“It’s about a mindset and an approach of taking pride in what we do. We have a lot of guys and girls that are part of it. I’m pretty proud, but it’s a long game and it’s little tiny victories every day and a constant learning process. It’s really exciting.”

You don’t have to look very far to see evidence of Moxley’s vision coming to fruition. In the handful of months since he’s been champion, working against Moxley has significantly raised the profiles of several aforementioned stars. Moxley’s program leading into AEW Full Gear against Orange Cassidy this past November was arguably the most significant of Cassidy’s career. Even someone like "Switchblade" Jay White — a former IWGP Heavyweight Champion — reached new heights as he's feuded with Moxley over the past few weeks.

That sentiment includes Moxley's opponent Wednesday, Hobbs, who was nowhere near the main event picture before he won the Casino Gauntlet match on the most recent "Dynamite." The sudden opportunity comes on the heels of Hobbs looking spectacular in a losing effort at December's Worlds End pay-per-view.

All of this speaks to precisely what Moxley wants to see from AEW's roster.

“Any time you step into the ring, any time you get the camera pointed at you with the light on, any time you do anything, it’s going to be whatever you make it,” Moxley says. “Everybody’s a good wrestler at AEW. I don’t know if there’s ever been a roster assembled of this many purely great, get-in-the-ring-and-wrestle pro wrestlers. There’s so much more to it though, to put yourself in a position to use those skills and capitalize with them. You can see some guys evolving to the next level beyond just being good wrestlers. It’s very gratifying to see.

“That thing with Orange, he’s one of those guys where you see him growing and evolving. You see this larger-than-life aspect coming out of him. You see it right before your eyes. You don’t even have to look at him, you can see it in the audience when he comes out, you see it happening. That kind of thing that’s hard to put into words, but you know he’s ‘got it’ — that’s the thing we have to foster and cultivate. We can’t just throw him out there. It’s a seed that has to be watered and grown.”

Moxley himself is putting his money where his mouth is, particularly with growth and in the creative process. Despite several relatively obvious connections between the Death Riders and legendary wrestling angles/stables (NWO, D-Generation X and The Shield), Moxley describes his method as one similar to David Lee Roth’s “banking” songwriting approach.

“It’s the way I have been operating for years and years,” Moxley says. "You constantly have a net open to everything you see and hear. That’s what’s great about wrestling, it’s a little bit of everything. Therefore, you can take from anything. My ears are always open and my brain is constantly filing away things. If there’s something I read in a book, a scene I see, a look an actor makes, a lyric in a song — literally anything I experienced with my eyes and ears will be filtered and filed for if it’s ever useful. When you’re creating, you have this giant bin of stuff that you take from. It’s years and years of this filing cabinet of stuff.”

During this recent championship run — no person has held AEW’s top championship more frequently than Moxley — he’s adding to that wealth of wrestling knowledge, leading by example by never settling and constantly learning, even as he approaches 40 years old and with more than two decades of experience.

“It’s not, ‘Oh, I’m wrestling tonight so I just go in and do yada, yada, yada,'” Moxley says. “I’m looking at everything from a higher up vantage point and having to learn about things beyond just myself and the people directly next to me. Everything I touch, whether it’s people directly involved with me, everything that has to do with what I’m doing on screen and everything that affects, I take a personal responsibility in all of that.

"Not all of that happens in front of your eyes on the screen. I’m learning a lot about the most efficient ways to make things work, learning ways we are doing things that are inefficient and figuring out how to improve them. Ways we can not let things slip through the cracks, areas we can improve, getting in there and trying to dissect. Not leaving any stone unturned. Peeling back the whole onion beyond what you see on the screen in two people locking up inside the ring.”

If the two champions hook doesn’t quite capture the dichotomy of how Moxley is being portrayed as leader of the Death Riders versus his presence behind the scenes, it’s clear once you hear him talk about his place in the AEW ecosystem.

Part of his, and AEW’s evolution, is necessitated by the fact that the relatively new promotion just began a $185 million streaming deal with Warner Bros. Discovery. In addition to airing on TBS and TNT, AEW programming can now be found on Max. The stakes are raised, for everyone involved.

“I don’t work for AEW. I work for all of the people that need this place to succeed, that’s the way I look at it," he says. "For this place to succeed, we’ve got to operate at the highest level at every level. That’s what we accept if you’re going to be a part of this team. I feel a responsibility to these people because to be successful in wrestling, they’ve given and sacrificed their lives for the pursuit of this, as I had. I am but a servant to the pursuit of helping the whole thing, raising it up and bringing along as many people as we can. It’s making me better and helping me learn a hell of a lot.”

So as Moxley, whichever version you choose to dissect, prepares for his next championship defense, in the city he grew up in and calls home, on a nationally broadcast AEW tentpole edition of "Dynamite" dubbed “Maximum Carnage” — considering Moxley’s involvement, is there a more-fitting title? — he admits that he’s in an entirely different place on his journey than he's ever been before.

“It’s one of the most rewarding times in my career right now,” Moxley says. “Where I’m at in my career, it’s rewarding every single day and I look forward to every single day for a different reason than I used to. It’s not just go out, get a big pop, flex, throw a t-shirt, sign an autograph. It’s the pursuit of something much greater than that. It’s fun, man.”