Exclusive: Jake "The Snake" Roberts on working with AEW, the influence of Diamond Dallas Page, future projects & more
Simply put, few people have accomplished anywhere close to as much within the wrestling business as Jake "The Snake" Roberts. Not only is he in rare company as a WWE Hall Of Famer who main-evented events all over the world, but he continues to work in and around the wrestling business over 45 years after his in-ring debut.
These days, Jake "The Snake" Roberts is not only on weekly television via AEW and its Dynamite program, but he is also regularly on the road doing spoken-word performances and appearing at major Comic Con-style events. Meanwhile, he has a book slated for release in 2020 and plans to launch a podcast in the near-future.
The recent career renaissance of Jake "The Snake" Roberts is largely tied to the Diamond Dallas Page-produced documentary known as The Resurrection Of Jake The Snake documentary. Released in 2015, the film chronicled Roberts' road to recovery and and among other accolades, it won the Audience Award for "Best Documentary Feature" at the 2015 Calgary Underground Film Festival.
Jake "The Snake" Roberts remains in close contact with Diamond Dallas Page and the DDPY team. As told to me by DDPY instructor Garett Sakahara: "Things have really come full circle when it comes to Jake. My parents remind me now that growing up as a kid, how mesmerized I was of Jake... He went from someone I looked up to, to someone we all wanted to help, and he’s now like family to me! When he’s in town in Southern California, he’ll hit up my parents to see if they want to go to dinner and I love this!"
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jake "The Snake" Roberts by phone on March 23, 2020, and that conversation is embedded below for your listening pleasure. Part of the interview has been transcribed below exclusively for Sportskeeda.
Interestingly enough, one day after our phone call, Roberts called me back to tell me more about DDPY Labs' upcoming Jacked product, his book and his podcast. Audio from that March 24th conversation will be released at a later day, along with more information from DDPY's Garett Sakahara. In the meantime, more on Jake "The Snake" Roberts can be found online at www.jakethesnakeroberts.com.
On whether he has been mentoring anyone in the AEW locker room:
Jake "The Snake" Roberts: There's a couple that have come [for mentoring]. I put my hand out, I went to each guy and said, "Look, man, I'm here for you. This ain't about me, I'm here for you. If there's any way I can help, if there's any questions I can answer, please come to me."
I've only had two people come to me. One of them had something that they really wanted to talk about and I was able to help them with interviews. I got them going in the right direction, anyway. I felt really good about that, he's a young kid. His dad was a wrestler, "Mr. Ass" Billy Gunn. It was Billy Gunn's son [Austin] that came to me and wanted help. That really made me feel good, man.
His dad is a superstar and Hall of Famer in his own right and you're coming to me? I get that. Sometimes it's easier to ask someone else that isn't your dad... It was easy for me, my dad didn't want to help. (laughs)
On how he wound up in AEW:
Jake "The Snake" Roberts: My name kept getting brought up by people, but it was actually [Tony] Khan that said "I want him in here." That's quite a compliment there. That's not the way I expected to be brought in, I expected it to be through Dallas or through Dustin [Rhodes], but it wasn't, it was Khan who wanted me in there.
He's the one that initiated the "let's get him." I did the little card-dealing gimmick I did for them [at Double Or Nothing], that was just a nice thing to do, where I dealt the cards out for that thing they were doing. But then to get invited to do this angle [with Lance Archer and Cody Rhodes) was much bigger. It's going to be huge. We haven't really started it yet. It's yet to blossom into what it's going to be. We're going to do some more stuff this week.
They've gone back to the old-school way of doing things, which I love. That's building something instead of doing it the WWE way where they build it the first part of the show and then end it by the end of the show. (laughs) This, people will remember, because they're taking the time to build it properly.