A Paradigm Shift: Jon Moxley's Jump From WWE To AEW

On May 25, 2019, All Elite Wrestling staged their inaugural event, Double or Nothing. The 11,000 fans in Las Vegas' MGM Grand Garden Arena and the more than 100,000 households that purchased the event on pay-per-view witnessed an ambitious first showing from the budding promotional powerhouse.

Following four hours of high quality matches featuring an eclectic mix of indy standouts, cult favourites, and proven headline stars, the story of the night was saved for the final page.

As Chris Jericho demanded reverence from the Las Vegas crowd following his main event win over Kenny Omega, the chorus of boos began giving way to slivers of frenzied cheers. Suddenly, the cameras picked up Jon Moxley pushing his way through the sea of humanity in the crowd, making a beeline for the ring.

Four months earlier, Moxley was still Dean Ambrose, all too recently the WWE Intercontinental Champion, where he had worked for for close to eight years, a company where he had once reigned as WWE Champion.

The man beneath both gimmick names had grown weary of life in his longtime home, though, and when met with one frustrating impasse after another, he decided it was time to make a change.

Dean Ambrose’s Early Years In WWE

Jon Moxley had a cult following to his name when he signed with WWE in the spring of 2011. The man rechristened Dean Ambrose soon found a larger audience at the 2012 Survivor Series in Indianapolis, while flanked by Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins. 

The three members of what became known as The Shield dressed in similar black attire going forward, but each was exceedingly distinct from his brothers. Reigns was the brooding muscle, Rollins the brash daredevil, and Ambrose was the twisted sadist. Each possessed winning qualities in abundance, and that made this trio so compelling.

Considered the more charismatic of the three, Ambrose possessed a magnetic energy, with twists and hitches in his gait, and a subconscious contort in his myriad of expressions. Many have likened Ambrose's manic vibes to those of the departed Brian Pillman, or even Heath Ledger's Joker in the sense that each could command attention, even in silent moments.

Fans picking up on Dean Ambrose's talents were learning what Jon Moxley fans had known for years; this was the farthest thing from a cookie cutter wrestler that there was.

Ambrose felt like a natural top heel, but when The Shield split up in 2014, he went in the opposite direction. Rollins, a graceful and valiant high flyer in the mould of Shawn Michaels, went the selfish sell-out route. Ambrose, the aberrant brute, became a blue collar brawler with some semblance of a moral compass.

While Rollins the face and Ambrose the heel seemed to make more sense in 2014, the way WWE executed the fallout worked well enough. As such, Ambrose's popularity only seemed to increase.

His popularity was rewarded with championships, too. Across over six years on the main roster, Ambrose held three Intercontinental Titles, one US Title, two Tag Team Titles, and was WWE Champion for 84 days in 2016, having been the final of the three members of The Shield to hold the WWE Championship on that fateful night at Money in the Bank. 

While pushed as a top talent in the company, Dean Ambrose wasn’t exactly satisfied, and he hadn’t been satisfied for a long time. 

Jon Moxley Vs. Dean Ambrose

The Jon Moxley on TV in AEW is something of an understated nihilist. To see Moxley is to see the dogged anti-heroism of a Snake Plissken, or the street smart courage of a John McClane, the latter of whom Moxley admitted he’d largely model his ideal character after.

Whereas Moxley's means of expression were more straightforward and cutthroat, Ambrose could be a bit more of a random, offbeat, wacky sort of guy. Whether he was toting around a "pet" potted plant, or absent-mindedly almost forgetting the WWE Title belt in the back of a taxi cab, or rigging Rollins' Money in the Bank briefcase with projectile slime, or pushing around a hot dog cart, Ambrose remained a popular character, though rather heavy on the “ha-ha” comedy.

The man behind Dean Ambrose wasn't finding much fulfilment in this role, however. Moxley felt Ambrose was designed to be nothing more than a detached, non-plussed eccentric, like the wacky neighbour on an evening sitcom.

Ambrose would often confront Vince McMahon over scripted matters. Whenever Ambrose took umbrage with any character objectives that he thought were ridiculous or non-sensical, McMahon would apparently try and strongly sell the creative to him, reasoning that it fit his actor to a T. The phrase, "Such good sh*t", entered wrestling lexicon forever following Moxley's appearance on Talk is Jericho where the ex-WWE star laid out his many years worth of frustrations. Because, according to Ambrose, those three words were what Vince McMahon would describe those creative objectives to him as, in response to the former Shield member taking issue with them.

Here, Ambrose felt like he had partially doomed himself. He had made silly ideas work before with his effort and execution, so WWE continued to script silly ideas for him to perform.

As Moxley would later detail, he resented not only the content he was given to work with, but the fact that he wasn't trusted to produce his own material, something more from the heart. Being handed his verbiage by a writer (especially all of the ha-ha material) seemed to create one heartburn moment after another for the man whose monologues from the indies were vital to the legend.

In his own words, Moxley said of his time in WWE, "Promos used to be my favourite part of wrestling. I loved it. It ended up becoming my least favourite part."

An Infamous Heel Turn

For most of 2018, Dean Ambrose sat on the shelf recovering from a torn triceps sustained shortly before the previous Christmas. While recovering, Moxley had missed being able to feed off of live crowds. As his return to the WWE drew closer, he craved getting a chance to relish that feeling again.

As he had those thoughts, he admitted a more realistic thought crept into his mind: the creative stifling he'd come to expect in WWE, and with it the inability to express himself naturally, was likely to still be there when he came back.

“I was excited to come back to wrestling, but I was not excited to come back to WWE,” Moxley said.

After coming to grips with his return likely being more of the same, Jon Moxley made the decision to leave WWE at the expiration of his deal in the spring of 2019. For the time being, Moxley kept his intentions close to the vest as he still had around nine months left on his contract when he made his return just before SummerSlam 2018 to back-up Seth Rollins.

After helping Rollins regain the Intercontinental Championship at SummerSlam, the duo would reunite with Roman Reigns to reform The Shield. The faction would then feud with Braun Strowman, Dolph Ziggler, and Drew McIntyre which led to a trios match at Super ShowDown in Australia, with The Shield coming out on top. 

Strowman, Ziggler and McIntyre would get their win back on the post-PPV edition of Raw two days later, but The Shield would finish the trios battle with two wins to one on the October 15, 2018 episode of Raw. 

The Shield reunion halted Ambrose’s pitch to turn heel, though, with Ambrose making the pitch to Vince McMahon while the former WWE Champion was still recovering from his injury. McMahon wanted to go ahead with the Shield reunion before Ambrose was granted his wish. 

It would ultimately be one of the most infamous heel turns in WWE history. The night of October 22, 2018 proved to be a historic one in the annals of WWE history. Roman Reigns, then the Universal Champion, announced to the world that he had suffered a recurrence of leukaemia and he would be taking time off to fight the illness. After vacating the Universal Title in an emotional segment, Reigns was embraced by Rollins and Ambrose.

Raw then looked set to end with a crowd-pleasing moment as Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose defeated Dolph Ziggler and Drew McIntyre to capture the Raw Tag Team Titles. Following the win, though, and just a couple of hours after Reigns’ leukaemia announcement, Ambrose turned heel, laying out Rollins with Dirty Deeds before Ambrose proceeded to beat down his friend as Raw went off the air. 

It took weeks for Ambrose to offer an explanation for the startling double-cross. When he did, he claimed it was because The Shield made him weaker, and that Rollins had treated him like a joke. With that, he burned his Shield vest in a flaming barrel.

The promo itself was fairly effective, and spelled out Ambrose's angst well enough. With that sort of animosity lingering heavy in the air, the stage was set for an intense rivalry between former friends.

Dean Ambrose The Germaphobe

One week after the vest-burning, Raw emanated from Los Angeles on the night after the 2018 Survivor Series. With multi-brand warfare now over for the year, Ambrose and Rollins could continue their feud proper. That was the hope, anyway. 

For reasons that aren't exactly clear, and may never be clear even with the best possible explanation, Dean Ambrose received a character retooling. Instead of just being an annoyed brawler with an ax to grind, Ambrose was all of a sudden an easily-repulsed germaphobe that debased the audience for being odorous and disgusting. Rather than solely focus on the festering bitterness he had towards his old friend, Ambrose was supposed to gripe about the "smelly" audience in LA in multiple segments. At one juncture, in his final promo of a busy night, Ambrose was supposed to make a reference to a "pooper scooper."

Mortified, Ambrose worked with creative to come up with a less-humiliating promo, praying it would get Vince's approval. The hope was that Vince could approve that script, and not see the one with the "pooper scooper."

Ambrose spent the bulk of that afternoon working on different promos for different pre-tapes, all the while crossing his fingers that he would gain approval for a more satisfying in-ring promo.

What Ambrose apparently got was a written directive from Vince himself, reiterating that insulting the audience was paramount. The directive also said that Ambrose needed to read his promos as they were written, without trying to change them.

Ambrose also questioned a cruel remark written about real-life friend Roman Reigns' leukaemia battle, in which Ambrose would refer to it as "karma." McMahon apparently explained away the remark as needing to include the absent Reigns in the story, since Ambrose had functionally turned on him as well.

Ambrose, who admitted to being strained by all of the hoop-jumping and filming throughout the afternoon, did the line as directed, and remembered feeling disgusted as soon as he uttered it.

If there was one positive to the exhausting, mentally-draining day, it was that Ambrose's non-pooper scooper promo was approved. The problem was the newer script initially made reference to Ambrose saying he would "need a gas mask" to deal with the crowd's stench. As a prop was mentioned on a WWE creative document, this meant eventually Ambrose would actually don a gas mask. 

As Moxley recalled, that was the day he began literally counting down, on his phone's calendar, the days until his WWE contract expired. After Raw the following week, he knew for sure that once his deal ran out, he wasn't coming back.

This was the infamous Raw in Milwaukee in which Ambrose did a pre-taped segment at a doctor's office. To explain the suddenly-germaphobic Ambrose not being in the arena, he was filmed receiving an on-camera inoculation, to protect him from the diseased denizens of Milwaukee.

According to Ambrose, Vince felt that this segment would actually generate heat for his feud with Rollins. The plan was also for Ambrose to make another comment about his real-life friend but Ambrose refused. The exact line is not known because Ambrose refused to say it, even on a podcast many months later. Moxley believes that had he uttered it on TV, somebody could have lost their job and WWE sponsors would have been up in arms.

In this case, McMahon acquiesced to Ambrose's refusal, but to the former Shield member it was just another example of the two being on radically-different pages when it came to how Dean Ambrose should be portrayed creatively. Whether it was wacky comedy or ham-fisted attempts at garnering heat, the two did not see eye to eye.

"For whatever reason, we're like Mentos and Diet Coke. Me and Vince together, we just create this explosion of goofy nonsense that I detest," Moxley said on Talk is Jericho in 2019.

After that November 26, 2018 edition of Raw, Ambrose was committed to becoming Jon Moxley again.

Dean Ambrose Gives His Notice To WWE

The feud between Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins continued regardless, leading to an underwhelming semi-main event match at TLC 2018 which saw Ambrose capture the Intercontinental Championship. Ambrose would remain Intercontinental Champion into early 2019, but he hadn’t changed his mind about leaving. 

At the weekend of the 2019 Royal Rumble, then-Senior Director of Talent Relations Mark Carrano approached Ambrose about a contract extension, but Ambrose baulked at the offer of just over $1 million per year for five years, with Moxley verbalising his intention to leave WWE when his contract expired at the end of April.

On the Tuesday following the Royal Rumble, Pro Wrestling Torch reported that Ambrose had given his notice. WWE then issued a press release later in the day confirming that Ambrose was not going to re-sign and that they wished him well in his future endeavours. 

The fact that WWE put out this press release led many sceptics to believe it was all a work. But it wasn't - Ambrose was leaving, and WWE scored a few points in the "gracious" department for their statement.

Dean Ambrose, Nia Jax & EC3

What seemed less gracious was the initial booking direction for Moxley going forward. The day before news of his notice broke, Ambrose lost cleanly to Seth Rollins in the Monday Night Raw opener, which wasn’t all that malicious as wrestlers lose on the way out all the time.

Moments later, though, while he was still in the ring, Ambrose had an altercation with Nia Jax, which resulted in Jax knocking him down. According to Ambrose, he learned of that spot one hour before Raw went on the air, and that it was the result of a late re-write. With word of his leaving making it to the upper echelon of WWE, Ambrose saw this as an attempt at a burial.

After learning of the re-write, Ambrose confronted Vince McMahon that night before showtime. McMahon allegedly claimed he had no idea that Ambrose hated all of those goofy angles he was in, despite Moxley claiming he had expressed his objections to McMahon personally on many occasions. Moxley also claimed that Vince tried to pass off Nia Jax taking him down as building to a special attraction, and that they weren't burying him on the way out.

Dean Ambrose vs. Nia Jax was locally advertised for a February house show in Jonesboro, Arkansas. While Nia did get physical in the men's Royal Rumble that January weekend, inter-gender matches just didn't happen in 2019 WWE, nor had they happened for many years. Little more than a week after that in-ring confrontation, the match between Ambrose and Jax was cancelled.

There was a very real sense that the fans were not going to allow Ambrose to be thoroughly buried, and a new national promotion in All Elite Wrestling had just launched, with WWE very much facing a PR battle at the time of avoiding being the evil empire. 

Ambrose went on to lose to Raw newcomer EC3 in under three minutes the following week. Again, putting over others on the way out doesn't equate to a burial, necessarily. But here, many fans saw it differently, and began vocalising their support for Ambrose.

At the following weekend's house shows in Ontario and Michigan, EC3 continued to go over Ambrose, to which fans vehemently booed. Ambrose seemed to have many supporters that sided with him against WWE, and EC3 bore the brunt of fan disdain.

Reportedly, McMahon got word of those crowd reactions, and was not happy. As a result, the outbound Ambrose actually defeated EC3 the following week in a rematch on Raw. For Ethan Carter III, it was all downhill from there in WWE.

Dean Ambrose Finishes Up With WWE

Shortly thereafter, Ambrose was hastily turned face, and reunited with The Shield, including Reigns, who was now in remission and had returned to WWE programming. From here, Ambrose would be thoroughly beaten by Drew McIntyre on TV and at WWE house shows, but he would team with his Shield stablemates in feel good victories. 

Ambrose didn’t work WrestleMania 35, an event which saw Seth Rollins capture the Universal Championship and Roman Reigns defeat Drew McIntyre. Jon Moxley would wrestle two final matches in April, however, the last of which was a WWE Network special named The Shield’s Final Chapter on April 21 in Moline, Illinois. In one last hurrah, The Shield defeated Drew McIntyre, Baron Corbin, and Bobby Lashley, something they had been doing on WWE TV in the months leading up to Ambrose’s exit, including in the main event of Fastlane 2019. In an apparent final act of pettiness, Ambrose’s payoff for his final WWE match was $500. 

As part of the WWE Network special, the three men were interviewed by Michael Cole. Anticipating that Cole was going to ask a question that might try to spin his exodus as a show of weakness, Ambrose said: "Eight years ago, I walked into this casino. Now I’m cashing in my chips and I’m walking away from the table. I won the game. What I do with the rest of my life from here on out is my business. I answer to no one. This time the ‘Million Dollar Man’ didn’t get what he wanted. Because I can’t be bought."

The Aftermath

Five weeks later, there was Jon Moxley, closing out AEW Double or Nothing, coincidentally while standing on a giant stack of poker chips after he laid out Kenny Omega. 

Ever since, Jon Moxley has been at the very least one of All Elite Wrestling’s top stars. His early months would see him miss All Out 2019 due to injury but his feud with Kenny Omega would end in victory for Moxley in a critically acclaimed Lights Out Match at that year’s Full Gear. At the next pay-per-view, Revolution 2020, Jon Moxley would defeat Chris Jericho to capture the AEW World Championship for the first time. 

Moxley has held the AEW World Championship three more times since then, while he has also reigned as AEW International Champion and AEW Continental Champion. He has also been a part of two factions, first Blackpool Combat Club, and then the Death Riders, which was formed in the aftermath of his heel turn against Bryan Danielson.

Moxley has also enjoyed success in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, having debuted for NJPW in June 2019, winning the IWGP United States Heavyweight Title on his first night in the company. Moxley would go on to have a second reign with the US belt, but his greatest success in New Japan would emerge in 2024 when he held the IWGP World Heavyweight Title (now the IWGP Heavyweight Title once again) for 79 days. 

While his tenure in WWE could have gone better in his eyes, Jon Moxley did express gratitude for a number of positive things. He got to live out a part of his wrestling dream, work with Make-a-Wish, and meet his future wife, Renee Paquette. 

There remained that sense of unfulfillment, however, and despite many attempts to satiate his creative sweet spot, he just couldn't beat what he felt was WWE's structural inflexibility.

Looking to quench his desire elsewhere, Jon Moxley left WWE behind peaceably, his ”prison break" vignette notwithstanding. While grateful for what WWE did for him professionally and personally, Moxley summed up all his feelings on Jericho's podcast by saying, "The ultimate reward I got from WWE was my freedom."