Nikki Bella Talks About Wanting To Feud With Paige, NXT Divas And More

Nikki Bella recently spoke with Digital Spy to promote Total Divas appearing on E! UK later this month. Below are some highlights:

How threatened do you feel by some of the amazing talent in NXT, like Emma, Charlotte, Bayley, Sasha Banks and the rest?

“I actually have to say I’m really, really excited. When you have such a love and passion for wrestling and you love to work, you want to get in with good workers. I want those girls to come up, I want to get in the ring with them. I want challenges, I want to compete. I don’t want it to always be easy. I don’t want it to always just be a few of us girls. I want there to be competition. I’ve been an athlete and competitor my whole life, and there’s nothing more that I get off on than competition. I was saying earlier that I want to wrestle Brie. Brie’s gotten so good in the ring and [Daniel] Bryan [Danielson] and her have worked so hard in that ring before live events. I want to get in there and wrestle my sister! That’s the fun part, when you get in there with someone who has the same passion for wrestling and that can work well and you can put on a good match where you can really just get at each other.”

“There’s a few matches in the past few months that I’ve had with Natalya, my goodness, we’re actually going at it really hard. We were loving it! The harder we were hitting each other, the better it was. It was just fun to do certain takedown moves. That’s the stuff that makes it fun, so I’m happy ‘cos these girls down there have been training hard and I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about them and I’m like, ‘Get up here, I’m excited!’.”

“I was excited when Paige came up. If she goes heel one day, I’m like, please! I’m hoping for it because I’m a babyface and there’s nothing more that I’d love than to work a program with Paige. I think it’d be awesome. So I’m excited for these girls to come up. I never look at people as threats, because I’m always like, ‘What makes our product better?’ Having great female wrestlers makes our product better.”

When are you going to be back in the Divas Championship picture?

“I hope soon! I want that Divas Championship. When I train in the gym and when I go to the ring early and train, all I think about is getting that Divas Championship. How can I be impressive? How can I have the crowd be behind me and connect with me and want me to be the Divas Champion? I think about that all the time, all the time! That’s what’s on my vision board. I truly hope to get that Championship back. I had it for a week, and I want a longer reign than that. I want to make that Championship mean something. I want to get great storylines.

“And if anything I hope Paige takes it off of AJ and Paige and I go into a story. I would love to take it off Paige. That would be awesome. Hopefully Paige and I can do something after her and AJ are done, but we’ll see. It’s live TV and it changes every week, but I want to get in it, I want to get in it bad. I have stuff up my sleeve that I want to show the crowd, that I’m waiting and saving it for, but I just can’t wait – I hope it’s soon.”

John has been ‘The Guy’ for so long which brings the love/hate thing – how do you feel about that, do you feel protective of him?

“John loves this business, he truly lives and dies for this business. It’s what he breathes. I’m with him all the time and when he’s not at work, he’s doing whatever he can to make work better. I’m very protective of him, I’ve always referred to myself as a lioness. That’s my king and I’m the queen! But when I hear those chants it actually makes me laugh because if they didn’t like him they wouldn’t even say his name. I think it’s become more fun. When you hear it you hear all the little kids say ‘Let’s go, Cena!’ and then you hear the men say ‘Cena sucks’.

“I think deep down they truly like him and they’ in awe of him, like, ‘Gosh, his body!’ He’s a cool guy. But I think it’s just become a fun thing to do. If they truly hated him… like when people wanted to say we hate Dave Batista, they weren’t giving him that much attention. Then they started to [give him attention] because they were like, ‘He’s back to work, we respect that’. With John I think it’s become more a fun thing to do. That’s the chant you do! They do it before the shows start. Before the show’s even started, that’s the chant that you’ll always hear!”