Willow Nightingale Says It Would Be ‘Really Cool’ And ‘Mean A Lot’ To See Intergender Wrestling On AEW Televsion

Willow Nightingale talks about intergender wrestling becoming a thing in All Elite Wrestling.

Earlier this year at AEW Double Or Nothing, Willow Nightingale and Marina Shafir would be the first women to be official participants in the annual Anarchy In The Arena match. Shafir and Nightingale would be involved in several intergender moments on AEW television surrounding the Anarchy In The Arena match, including taking finishes from Swerve Strickland and Jon Moxley respectively on an episode of AEW Dynamite.

While speaking to Blavity in a new interview, Willow spoke about being a part of this year’s Anarchy In The Arena match, noting that it was ‘mind boggling’ to look around the room at who she was teaming with in the match.

“I think Anarchy In The Arena, along with really any big moment in my career, you don’t realize the gravity of it until you’re on the other side. Looking around the room and seeing who I was teaming with was mind-boggling. I saw on Twitter somebody referred to us as, if AEW had assembled their Avengers, this is the team that they would’ve picked. And I was like, that’s crazy. To look around at people like that — [Samoa] Joe, Kenny [Omega], really everyone on the team. When you look around and think about how these are people that you’ve admired for years, and then you’re like, oh, but I am not just looking up to them. I am their peer. I am just as deserving of being here as they are, but I still do obviously know that they’re so much more experienced than I and have so much more knowledge to hand down to me. In those weeks when I was working with the guys, I was just trying to absorb as much as possible — whether that just be the way that they command themselves, the way that they speak to other people, the way that they view and present themselves. I felt like that was a very important thing that I tried to pick up on. Because in women’s wrestling, now it’s changing a little bit where you will see women having much longer careers. But when you’re looking at veterans of wrestling for 20-plus years, you don’t come across that in other women very often. You’re not seeing it in the locker room — how somebody with that much experience under their belt presents and carries themselves.”

Willow would continue on the topic of intergender wrestling, recalling how her and Marina Shafir interacted with the men during a mixed tag team bout a couple of months ago on AEW Dynamite.

“The first time I felt like I really kind of got to mix it up was when I tagged with Swerve [Strickland] against Marina and Mox to the point that they both put hands on us as well, which I think was the thing that really shattered down that barrier, made the little crack to have it open up for Anarchy In The Arena. It’s something that I wear with pride to be one of the people that really helped push the boundaries. There are so many people that paved the way for intergender wrestling to happen on television in such a way. I can’t say that I know what’s going to happen or that it will happen, but personally, having been any part of it, if it does happen, it would be really cool. It would mean a lot.”

Elsewhere in another recent interview, Nightingale discussed the idea of her exploring free agency during her contract year with AEW. You can read more about that here.