Lio Rush discusses his WWE release, clashing with Triple H & Ever After [EXCLUSIVE]

Before we lift the mood again, one last thing I need to ask. You mentioned Triple H being the one to bring you back after the hiatus. How did the relationship end between you and Triple H, or you and Vince McMahon? Did it end on good terms?

I really don't know. I have no idea. I mean, that first hiatus that I had from the company, I was dealing with Vince and, yeah, he had said that he was going to reach out to me at some point during my time at home but I just never got a call from anybody or heard anything from anybody so I was dealing with Vince at that point but then, once I came back to the company, and I started to wrestle for 205 Live again, being at the same tapings as Friday Night SmackDown on FOX, I saw Vince, I would see Vince all the time and he would just... He would say, you know, "Hey, good to see you hope you're doing okay," and stuff like that, so it felt like... Even though he didn't really reach back out to me after the initial hiatus, it felt like he still acknowledged me, he still acknowledged the fact that I was away and now I'm back, so that was a good feeling to have from the boss.

Triple H... I don't know if it ended on good terms or not because I feel like me and Hunter, we clashed heads a lot. We were always in disagreement as far as what the plan was for me and how he saw me as a character or how he saw me as an asset to the brand.

I feel like we were just always disagreeing all the time and it s****d because obviously I looked up to Triple H when I was a kid and stuff like that, so it was weird trying to break that separation from being an admirer of his but now, at the same time, I'm an employee of his and he is my boss, so it was hard for me to separate the two and it was kind of disappointing every time I had a conversation with him - but the lack of communication leading up to the initial release was with Hunter.

You know, I was having some back-and-forth conversations with him, and then, out of nowhere, it just kind of stopped four weeks. It just stopped. That's how I knew that something was weird, something wasn't right, and I felt like it was coming, my release was coming.

One man who I’ve interviewed since who spoke very highly of you is Bobby Lashley. what do you think of Bobby and what he’s doing just now?

I think he's incredible, and he's a living legend. Living legend. Everything I say about him in my promos is true, dude. He's awesome. Maybe not the "smells like money" part. Because he was always sweaty from the matches but it was pretty funny. Yeah, he's awesome, man. He taught me a lot while I was with him, with that run on Monday Night RAW. And just overall a good dude, a family man.

A lot of respect, a lot of mutual respect between the two of us just because we both went into a situation where we didn't know the direction, we didn't know the creative for it and we went out there every week on a limb and kind of did everything on the fly, just to see what stuck, and it was really cool. A lot of people reacted very positively towards all the stuff that we were doing and that's because me and Bobby would sit down and talk, and brainstorm ideas and, yeah, really good dude.

I'm not sure what he's doing now because obviously, since the release, I haven't really been involved in WWE or wanted to see the product itself but I'm sure whatever he's doing right now, he's giving it his all, 100% and he's going to land on his feet. If he's not on his feet now, he will be.

Next: What's next for Lio Rush?