Awesome Kong recently spoke with The Ringer while promoting season two of GLOW on Netflix; you can read a few highlights below:
Yes, yes it is. I think it’s fantastic for the show, however. When I do roam around L.A., I find myself explaining it unnecessarily. If I go to a burger joint, I’m like, “My hair—it’s for a project I’m doing.” They don’t ask, but I just feel like I have to explain my hair everywhere I go.
No, no. They weave it in, so it’s in for the whole season. So yeah, I walked around L.A. like that, with this weird mullet. When it’s not curled, the way Tammé wears it, it looks like a straight-up urban mullet! [Laughs] I’ll go around town like, “I didn’t do this on purpose. This is not one of those internet challenges. I’m doing a project.”
For sure! Absolutely, for sure. When I first went to Japan, I didn’t get to choose my name, Amazing Kong. In fact, I was training in Santa Monica at the New Japan dojo and Shinsuke Nakamura, who’s now a WWE superstar, called me Kong. I didn’t know if he was just unaware of the connotation that Kong would have for a black person, because he was from Japan, but I got really upset. Then they had to explain to me that they’d recently had a press conference, and that the company that was bringing me over had named me Kong.
So I had to go home and really contemplate and really consider what I’d be getting myself into, and whether or not I should just ditch the job, even though it would be a great opportunity for me. I was at home, in Hollywood at the time, and an N.W.A song came on. I remember thinking, “Hey, N.W.A stands for what it stands for.” Since they can be N.W.A, I could be Kong, and I would make this name my own, and make anyone who sees it, hears it, and relates it to me understand that it’s about respect. And that I did. Anyone who sees Amazing or Awesome Kong respects that name first. I feel that that’s a goal that my people should always work towards, not a meaning of ridicule or put-down, but always respect. I owned it, and I own it today.
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About two weeks before. It was a surprise to me, because a lot of us had heard, “Oh, they’re having a special episode that goes in a different direction from a traditional episode,” and most of us girls wouldn’t be in it. And I just assumed that I wouldn’t be in it. I had actually planned a trip to Hearst Castle and Santa Barbara. [Laughs] I was like, “I’ll have the week off! It’ll be fine!” And we got the script and I was like, “OK, well this is very interesting.”
It was, I tell you, a treat. A real treat. Just preparing for it, I could get extremely serious. I got an acting coach specifically for that episode, since there was a lot of drama and a lot of emotion in that episode. It was a treat all the way around, to learn more about Tammé and meet her son.
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