Posted on 7/26/125 by Colin Vassallo
Daria Berenato, formerly known as Sonya Deville in WWE, sat
down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in
Hollywood, CA to discuss her WWE contract not being renewed,
whether a return to wrestling is on the cards, the scary
home invasion that occurred in 2020, her work as a WWE
General Manager and slapping Adam Pearce, why she didn’t
enjoy her SummerSlam match with Mandy Rose, being injured
while reigning as Women’s Tag Team Champion, her upcoming
acting roles and more!
On whether she has retired from wrestling:
“Definitely for now. Never say never. But right now I feel
at peace with that. I’m not gonna lie, and I haven’t said
this, but it almost is like an open wound, and if I think
about wrestling somewhere else, it’s like I was so loyal to
the company, it was my only home from 21 years old to 31.
I’m a ride or die type of person in general. So it’s weird
to even think about doing that, but not there.”
On neither Mandy nor Sonya liking their SummerSlam match:
“Yeah, it’s not my favorite match. It pisses me off still,
because it’s my favorite storyline I’ve ever been a part of,
and I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done with
promo and character work and even the whole lead-up. But
yeah, we were a f*cking mess. Not to make excuses, but the
attempted kidnapping happened two nights before SummerSlam.
Vince wanted to scrap the match on our behalf. I told him
absolutely not, we worked this hard, and this motherf*cker
is not gonna ruin our moment. So we scrapped the hair versus
hair because I had to go to court and testify the next day
and I was like, I’m probably not in the right frame of mind
to be bald right now during all this, there was too much to
process. He agreed. And he was like, ‘Well, what do you want
to do?’ And I was like, I don’t know. I got to think of
something equally as high-stakes, another stipulation. So I
came up with the loser leaves town. So we get to work that
day, and the producers come up to us, and they’re like,
‘Okay, it’s now a loser leaves town match, but Daria is
going to go over.’ And it’s weird, because the producer and
Mandy felt like that wasn’t the right move, because Mandy
was supposed to be the babyface coming out of this. I was
obviously the heel, and I had been kind of kicking her ass
the whole angle, so I agreed with them. So I actually went
to Vince and Bruce and got the ending changed. I said, ‘Sir,
I think Mandy should win, because I have a way to get me
back from a loser leaves much better than we could get Mandy
back. Why don’t I come back as like a schizophrenic the next
week? And you’re trying to tell me that I don’t work here
anymore, and I lost, but I’m under the impression that I’m
somebody else, and we go with this whole angle.’ Vince’s
exact words were, ‘I f*cking love it! God damn it. You can
be hanging from my chandelier in the office, swinging
around.’ And I was like, Okay!
I didn’t see it like that. I didn’t see me hanging from your
chandelier, but sure, and so we were on the same page. It
was all good. Mandy was gonna get her comeuppance. I was
gonna get an amazing character arc out of it, and all was
gonna be well. And then the loser leaves happens, and I’m
not needed for TVs, like, one week, two weeks, three weeks,
four weeks, a month, two months, like, all this time’s going
by, and I’m texting Bruce from texting Vince. I’m like, ‘Hey
guys, what’s the deal? I thought I was coming back right
after. It’s the only reason I agreed to lose was because we
had this cool angle to come back and bring me back.’ They
were like, ‘Oh, just, just stay tight. Hang tight.’ Then all
of a sudden, finally, Bruce says, ‘You know, after a second
thought, when we do a loser leaves, we have to honor the
stipulation, so you have to stay gone for a while.’ I was
like, ‘Oh, why didn’t you tell me that when we discussed
this? I would have much rather have won.’ I don’t have many
regrets in life, but booking myself to lose that match is
probably my only one. And it was like a running joke when I
came back in the writers’ room with the head writers, they
kind of busted my chops and were like, ‘Remember that time
you booked yourself to lose a match that when we were trying
to push you?’ So much you don’t know behind the scenes,
because you’re not having these conversations like, ‘Hey,
when you win this one, we’re going to push you, and we want
Mandy to go in a different direction. You’re going to go in
a different direction.’ So it wasn’t that transparent. So I
didn’t really know what I was doing to myself at the time.
So I ended up sitting home for five months. Then I come
back, I go into Vince’s office, I’m like, ‘Hey, sir, what
are we doing? Like, what do we do now?’ He’s like, ‘What do
you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I have these
really cool suits in my hotel room, and I think it’d be cool
to have a boss vibe to me.’ He kind of looked at me and was
like, ‘Where are the suits?’ And I was like, they’re my
hotel room. He’s like, send a runner to go get them. I was
like, Okay, what the f*ck is going on? He didn’t tell me
anything. He’s like, ‘You’re gonna walk down the hallway in
a suit and superstars lined on both sides, and they’re gonna
be clapping for you.’ And you just walked down. And I’m
like, and then what? ‘That’s it.’ Okay? So I put my suit on,
getting hair and makeup, and if you go watch it back, my
return was I walked down the hallway in a suit with
superstars lined on both sides, and then that slowly evolved
into the GM character with Pearce.”
On working with Adam Pearce:
“I had so many crazy pitches for that character. Vince would
always say, we’re not booking Adam Pearce vs. Sonya Deville
at WrestleMania. Because I always wanted to push the limit
with Adam, but there was no payoff for him. He couldn’t get
a comeback, so we couldn’t go too far with it, but I did get
to slap him that one time. He’s tough. He was, like, lay it
in. I was like, Okay, careful what you asked for.”
On not revisiting her partnership with Chelsea Green:
“They just didn’t want to go back to it. They didn’t want to
go back to it. I had pitched that it would be a natural
angle to go after Piper and be like, ‘What the hell? Bitch,
that’s my f*cking championship!’ Very natural angle. But
they had this idea for this faction, and so that was where
we were gonna go. I will say, while I was out, I did pitch
coming back in my MMA gimmick, like a modified version, but
I did pitch going back to my roots, and I think Triple H had
the same kind of idea. He was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I was
thinking. Let’s do this group.’ When he told me the group, I
was like, Okay, interesting. I didn’t know how the three of
us were going to blend together, me, Zoe and Shayna, in PFC.
So I was open minded to it, and of course, whatever he
wants. I saw myself more as the mouthpiece in that scenario
and I was like, okay, but we couldn’t get our footing. And
then we were given the name Pure Fusion Collective, and I
thought that was terrible. I don’t think it was ever going
to be the thing, but we tried to make it work.”