Eva Marie could have been celebrating the Melania-um instead of the Eva-lution.
T.J. Stephens of PWMania.com recently spoke with Eva Marie, who revealed that her original name in WWE was going to be Melania.
“Honestly, I think at the very very beginning it was just one of those things,” Eva Marie said. “It was like a last-minute crazy thing of me even being on TV. It wasn’t supposed to happen, live television is like nuts. So I think what happened was Total Divas had just aired, and I hadn’t been on TV yet because… I don’t think I’ve ever shared this in an interview, but I got to keep my name. My full legal name is Natalie Eva Marie, I just go by my middle name for my character. So that’s one thing that is you know, pretty abnormal, keeping your name. So, the only way that happened was because all of a sudden Total Divas drops.”
Eva Marie then explained how Melania was changed, apparently due to the similarities to Natalya’s name.
“My name originally was supposed to be Melania,” Eva Marie said. “I dropped that out there because I don’t think I’ve ever shared that, but that was originally what was happening. We were talking about names and things of that nature and Melania was the one that was going to be for me, and then all of a sudden, Total Divas aired I believe on a Sunday, Monday Night Raw comes and then my first time on TV, I was valeting Natalia [Neidhart]. And it was just like Eva Marie, because obviously Natalie, Natalia, that’s not going to work, so we’ll go by her middle name, boom. And then that’s how I kind of initially got on to television. And for character-wise, I think it really, it really coincided with, obviously, the amazing WWE Universe and also Total Divas. So it had, I think, a very weird combination of those kinds of mixed into the bowl.”
Asked about the potential reaction to Melania, Eva Marie said it could’ve gone either way.
“It could have been either boos times a million, a lot more heat, or the opposite,” she noted. “Who knows?”
Eva Marie recently spoke to WrestleZone about her time on Total Divas and said the show helped bring a new audience to WWE.
“I don’t know if it gets the recognition that it necessarily deserves. But I do think that it definitely put a whole nother spotlight, and it brought in a whole other demographic into WWE,” she said. “I feel like there’s so many people that I meet where they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, watching Total Divas. It made my girlfriend or my wife interested in wrestling.’ And so I think in that realm, I think it did so much, and not only that but it just kind of opened up that different demographic of people that normally wouldn’t tune into Monday Night RAW or a Friday Night SmackDown.”
Check out her full remarks about Total Divas during our full interview:
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