NJPW star and IWGP United States Heavyweight Champion Kenny Omega recently did an interview on The Art Of Wrestling podcast. “The Cleaner” discussed the heat he has within the professional wrestling industry, most notably his heat with WWE, wrestlers who criticize The Elite, and revealed which WWE Superstar he used to bounce ideas off of. You can check out the highlights here:

Getting heat in the professional wrestling industry:

“I never purposely try to get heat with anyone. I try to just be a good human being, but with the way that we carry ourselves, just the way we run our show, our matches or whatever, heat’s just going to come with it.”

Being fine with having heat with WWE:

“If someone says to me, ‘hey, you probably have heat with this guy, or this guy, or this guy, in The Fed or The E,’ or whatever you want to call it, I don’t really pay too much attention to it because I know I haven’t done anything directly.

“I’m never actually directly trying to offend anyone from any other [pro wrestling] promotion. If someone says I have the greatest match of all time, that’s great. I’m going to use that to make my next match mean something or make the rematch mean something more.”

Wrestlers who criticize The Elite can not perform to The Elite’s level:

“Maybe I’m going to catch a lot of heat for saying this right now, but I think what all these people need to understand is whether they like it or not, and whether they’d like to admit it or not, is all three of us, we could go where they are and do what they do and do it better, but they could never do what we do.”

Bouncing ideas off Sami Zayn (a.k.a. Rami Sebei):

“The live house opinion is going to mean a lot, of course, because you can feel it, you can hear it. But yeah, but, like, if I ask The Young Bucks’ opinion that is pretty much the opinion that counts the most to me. Back in the day, like, before I was with The Young Bucks all the time and I was in DDT, it was always Rami, ‘Rami, what did you think?’ and if Rami gave it a stamp of approval.”