Shotzi Blackheart is finding herself after leaving WWE, and she would love rebuild her reputation as a ‘disgusting mastermind’.
The 33-year-old star, who was let go by the sports entertainment giant in May 2025, has been shining on the independent scene as she embraces her Ballsy Badass persona and takes the fight to her opponents with all sorts of gory props.
Speaking exclusively to Metro before she meets fans at For The Love of Wrestling in Manchester next month, she said: ‘I feel like I can say no to things, I’m kind of the ringleader when I have a match.
‘So anything that you’re seeing me doing, I probably came up with – I’m the disgusting mastermind behind it.’
In recent matches, that’s included everything from stapling a rival between the legs to using a whole smorgasbord of weapons in the mix, with everything from thumbtacks to light tubes and even doors.
‘I want that to be my little buddy. Like, I want people to know me for stapling people’s heads,’ she laughed.
‘When I’m wrestling, I don’t feel any pain ever, my adrenaline is going so high, and I just get in there and can just do whatever. But it’s after when the adrenaline goes down, that’s when you really start feeling things.’
Shotzi admitted that glass and barbed wire are when things really get dicey, and she has a huge amount of respect for people who regularly wrestle in deathmatches.
‘I know how much it sucks to pick glass out of your back after match,’ she said. ‘And they’ll do that like five nights in a row, and I’m just in awe of it.’
She found herself in a similarly gruesome bout with Matt Cardona before his recent WWE return, but the self-proclaimed Indy God (whose nickname has been adopted by Shotzi) was adamant about what they could do in the ring.
‘I was trying so hard to convince Matt [Cardona] to include glass in our match, but he had retired from glass at that point,’ she explained.
‘He had a really bad cut when he wrestled Nick Gage, a piece of glass got lodged in his back, and they ended up sewing the glass in his back, not knowing that it was in there. He had like a huge infection. He had to go get the glass taken out, and it was a whole mess.’
Shotzi wanted the match to be ‘really bloody and disgusting’ and even offered to be the one to go through a sheet of glass, but he wasn’t budging.
Now, Cardona is back on SmackDown with his real-life wife Chelsea Green, someone Shotzi has her own history with.
‘The last thing that I pitched before my contract expired was that I wanted to work with Chelsea,’ she recalled. ‘I was like, “Hey, what if me and Chelsea start a feud and we do like a tank versus title match?”‘
She laughed: ‘Can you imagine what my tank would have looked like, all like Chelsea Green’d out?!’
Chelsea has always strived to help people in wrestling, in a similar way to Bayley, who recently held an all-women’s wrestling camp for rising stars.
‘She’s just so dedicated to the business and to women’s wrestling, and it’s just so inspiring,’ Shotzi said. ‘I want even just a morsel of what she has to give to this business.’
The pair worked together on SmackDown in a bitter feud, which saw Shotzi shave off her signature green hair, while the real-life reason was in solidarity with her sister going through cancer treatment.
She wishes the feud could have ‘had more meat’ on it, adding: ‘She cut my hair and then I shaved my hair on TV, but we saw it as way more intense than what was portrayed on television. We wanted to get to a hair versus hair match at some point, and that was going to be the way that she took my hair. It got diluted so much.’
Now, Shotzi is getting to flex her creative muscles on the indies as she battles ‘imposter syndrome’ and tries to rediscover herself.
The former NXT tag champ still has feelings of ‘imposter syndrome’, but
‘I really needed this indie run to have full creative control of my career, and to be able to get here and learn from so many different walks of life,’ she said. ‘It’s helped me a lot to refine who I am, that girl that WWE saw a spark in and hired.’
She’s not closing the door on a return to WWE, but ‘not right now’.
‘I’m on fire right now, and I’m having so much fun,’ she beamed. ‘There are so many things that I want to do, like work for major companies like CMLL, or a really awesome women’s promotion in Japan.’
She added, ‘Whenever I get signed by who-knows-who, I’m coming back to TV as the most well-rounded version of Shotzi Blackheart. I want to come back the best I’ve ever been, and I haven’t gotten there yet.’
Shotzi will appear at For The Love of Wrestling in Manchester on February 21 and 22.
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