As AEW matures as a company, so does Perry as a performer

For the second time in under a month, Jack Perry will be competing for a world title on pay-per-view on Sunday night. The 26-year-old Los Angeles native will challenge Seiya Sanada for the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship at All Elite Wrestling and New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s co-promoted Forbidden Door show at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena.

You can catch AEW Rampage with Jack Perry taking on New Japan's DOUKI on Friday at 10pm et/7pm pt streaming on TSN+.

Perry’s rise up the card in AEW has been steady over the course of the company’s four-year history. Initially known simply as “Jungle Boy,” a moniker given to him due to his long, curly locks and resemblance to Tarzan, Perry won the AEW World Tag Team Championship alongside Luchasaurus, the hulking former Big Brother contestant Austin Matelson in a dinosaur mask, as the Jurassic Express in 2022, before striking off on his own as a singles performer.

The son of beloved actor Luke Perry, Jack Perry says it was the pomp and pageantry of professional wrestling that made him initially fall in love with it as a child.

“It was just the spectacle of the whole thing,” Perry told TSN.ca. “I had never seen anything like it before. I just really loved the athleticism and all of this crazy stuff that was going on. Then you had all of these crazy characters and all of these pretty women and then there’s fireworks and all of the craziest stuff you’ve ever seen. It was just like ‘Whoa!’ There’s nothing else like this.”

Small in stature himself, Perry was drawn to an iconic luchador as an early inspiration.

“I remember being really enamoured by Rey Mysterio when I was young because he was doing the type of things you’d only see in a movie and he could really do them right there [in front of you],” Perry said. “I also liked that he was smaller than pretty much everybody else, but just to see these sort of athletic things and think ‘Oh my God, people can do that with their bodies? That’s crazy.’ So I ended up getting a trampoline and tried to figure it all out.”

As Perry approached the end of his teens and the pursuit of pro wrestling as a career became a viable path for him, his parents didn’t stand in his way. In fact, they encouraged him to do so as long as he remained realistic about it.

“There was a time when I got out of high school and I didn’t know what I wanted to do because I knew I wasn’t really interested in pursuing an academic future, but I also wasn’t ready to say I’m gonna go out and be a wrestler yet,” Perry said. “So my parents, at that time, said just keep your options open because there’s a chance this is not going to pan out, but at the same time, pursue what you want to do, pursue what you love. That kinda sums up how they’d always been. My whole family has been really supportive, and they come to the shows a lot to watch me. I feel really fortunate to have that kind of backing because a lot of people don’t have that, and I think it’s helped me a lot.”

It just so happened that Perry’s family would become central to his on-screen shift into singles wrestling and a more mature direction for his character in AEW as the culmination of a yearlong angle involving Canadian wrestling legend, Christian Cage (Jay Reso).

At the 2021 Double or Nothing pay-per-view, Perry would eliminate Cage to win the Casino Battle Royale and earn a world title shot. Cage would go on to become a mentor figure for Perry and Luchasaurus, guiding the duo in AEW’s tag division to a championship win, all while covertly planning his revenge and turning Luchasaurus against Perry. When Jurassic Express finally lost their titles on the June 15, 2022, edition of Dynamite, Cage turned on Perry and the two embarked on a bitter feud.

It was during this feud that Perry began using his real name as his ring name, with “Jungle Boy” becoming a nickname rather than a primary one. The feud was marked by Cage’s promos in which he frequently disparaged Perry’s late father and with Perry’s mother and sister making appearances on shows, sitting at ringside.

Perry admits that having aspects of his personal life turned into a wrestling angle was difficult.

“It was not my favourite thing,” Perry said. “That whole time was kind of weird for me because – and I didn’t even really fully realize it was going to happen – it was a big sort of transition in my career from kinda happy-go-lucky Jungle Boy into a more real version of myself. And I even at that point started using my real name because it felt a little ridiculous in one sense, having Christian say all of this horrible stuff and then to be called ‘Jungle Boy.’ It kind of all just started a big shift, which kind of made me nervous. It was new stuff [for me], but I think it’s all worked out in the end.”

Working with a veteran with decades of knowledge and experience in the wrestling business like Cage was a worthwhile endeavour, Perry says.

“He comes from a different era of wrestling than I do, so he definitely thinks about different things that I would think about, or a lot of my contemporaries would think about,” Perry said. “It was also interesting to work with him in multiple scenarios because he was my mentor for more than a year, getting advice and having him teach me things, and then getting to work against him, it was interesting to see both sides of the coin.”

Perry’s opponent on Sunday night has recently experienced a transition of his own. The 35-year-old Sanada (stylized as “SANADA”) became world champion on April 8 after defeating “The Rainmaker” Kazuchika Okada for the title. The victory came after Sanada defected from the popular Los Ingobernables de Japon stable, where he had been a secondary figure for years behind its charismatic leader Tetsuya Naito, and took the helm of his own group, Just 5 Guys.

Asked if there are any parallels between him and Sanada, a former tag-team champion in his own right, Perry says he can see them.

“I was asking people who know more than me what’s this guy’s deal, what’s he about, what should I know and that’s kinda what I heard along the way,” Perry said. “It’s interesting because we’re a whole world apart. He’s on the other side of the planet, but we’re in the same business and kinda have a similar story. I think it’s really cool and it’s gonna make for just an interesting dynamic when we’re in there on Sunday.”

Working a match with an opponent who doesn’t speak English presents certain difficulties, but Perry believes there is something about pro wrestling that transcends language barriers.

“People say it, and I think it’s kinda cliché, but I think wrestling is kinda a universal language,” Perry said. “There are maybe a few little intricacies that are hard to explain, but I think for the most part, we all kind of know the same broad strokes of what it is. I haven’t had a very challenging experience with it yet, so we’ll see, but I’m excited about it, too. That’s kinda part of it, to learn and try this new thing out and see how it goes, sorta dip my toe in a new pool.”

The fact that Perry is positioned in a second straight title match isn’t something that is lost on him. It’s a demonstration of the company’s faith in one of its young stars.

“Jack Perry has been with us since our very first show and everyone in the company, as well as fans around the world, have watched Jack grow up as a wrestler and as a person in front of our eyes over these past several years," AEW president and booker Tony Khan said. "We’ve watched him mature into a top wrestler. He’s been a world tag-team champion here in AEW. He’s very popular with the fans and he’s very respected in the locker room as a great professional. He’s still so young and has so much to accomplish in pro wrestling.”

Perry and his three opponents in last month’s AEW World Championship match – Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF), Sammy Guevara and Darby Allin – have been dubbed “The Four Pillars of AEW,” a takeoff of “The Four Pillars of Heaven,” the name given to the hallmark stars of All Japan Pro Wrestling in the 1990s: Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Toshiaki Kawada and Akira Taue. These four men have been identified as the bedrock of AEW as a company.

While Perry doesn’t want to put too much stock into the label on the one hand, on the other, he’s fully cognizant of what it means and is proud to carry the mantle for AEW.

“I think I put a lot of pressure on myself every time I go out there, no matter what,” Perry said. “I try not to put too much weight into it because there are people out there saying, ‘Oh, this guy shouldn’t be a Pillar,’ so I try not to take it too seriously. It’s just kinda like a little nickname or whatever, but I will say this – I think if you look at who’s been there since the very beginning, of all the young guys in the [company], we are the four best and the four who have been going the hardest since Day 1.

“We went a whole year or whatever it was killing ourselves in front of nobody [during empty arena shows at the height of the pandemic] to keep the whole thing going, which everybody did, but there have been people who’ve come in along the way and I see people saying, ‘Oh, this guy should be [a Pillar],’ but you weren’t there since Day 1. We all came in, pretty much unknown, and built a fan base off of our work. I think that’s what it’s supposed to symbolize. Tons of people are great or whatever, but I think that’s what that is – we’re four young guys who’ve been here since the beginning as sort of building blocks in the structure of what this whole thing is going to become.”

What it’s going to become for Perry personally remains to be seen, but he hopes what comes next will be the continuation of the story we’ve seen so far in his young career – a Jungle Boy becoming a man.

“I think for me, the story of the whole thing is about growing up,” Perry said. “I think if you look at how everything kinda from the gimmick to my situation, all of that has changed over the last four or five years. I think you’ve seen that and we’re going to continue to see that. I think some people tap into what they are and what they’re going to be earlier than others. And I also think some people have [already] reached their potential as to what they could be. I like to think I’m not even close to that. I think five years from now, we’re gonna look back and say, ‘S--t, a lot’s happened since then!’ So that’s kinda my goal, to keep growing and keep having fun.”

While wrestling is undoubtedly a job for Perry, it’s the one he dreamed of as the boy on a trampoline trying to be Rey Mysterio.

“I think everyone gets so serious about it sometimes and there’s so much negativity about all this stuff, but I’m getting to wrestle on TV, which is always what I wanted to do as a kid,” Perry said. “It’s literally my job that supports my life. I’m a professional wrestler. It’s cool and it’s fun, so I try to just, at the end of the day, have fun and remember that I’m lucky and it’s a dream come true.”

That dream continues in front of a sold-out arena in downtown Toronto on Sunday night.