On May 25, 2019 Jon Moxley made his All Elite Wrestling (AEW) debut with the old ring name Jon Moxley at the end of the first pay-per-view in the company's history, Double or Nothing, attacking after their match Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega and the referee. On June 29th, at Fyter Fest he won his first AEW match in an Unsanctioned match against Joey Janela; after the match he was attacked by Omega.
In an interview with PWInsider, the former WWE superstar reflected on putting together a match vs. putting together a fight scene: “Complete opposite ends of the spectrum. In the movie, it’s all written out and constructed, and with the fight coordinators and guys, and go back and forth, and you rehearse it a million times, and do it a million times over and over from different angles.
Doing a movie, while it’s fun, it can also be very tedious because you just got to do the one little scene over and over and over from every different angle. And it can be challenging to keep your energy up and stuff like that. Especially when it’s a physical scene like a fight scene.
The match with Hager was just like, we started to film three weeks worth of stuff on that day, and we had only a few hours because you got to wait until it gets dark to film at Daily’s Place where they film at. So we had to figure out… And I’m choking. Right. We had figure out what we wanted to film, and how we were going to build to a title match. Because we didn’t really have any plans when I got to Jacksonville. I was like, “Well this, you’ll attack me, you’ll choke me out. We’ll do this. And then we’ll just do the match.
At that time we were like only 10 people in the building. We didn’t know when we were going to get to film again. Should we save it? I was like, “I don’t know. Because who knows?” I was like, “Let’s just get it in the can. Let’s just do it right now.” So we just did the whole kind of Hager angle all in one night. And that’s the exact opposite where it’s just like, “Yeah. I’ll just see you out there.” Just talk a couple of words about the finish, and me and him just wrestle for 20 minutes, which it was really fun actually. You have that nice humidity in Jacksonville outdoors. So it’s getting nice and loose. And there’s no audience there to pump you up. So I just put my mindset to where, all right, this is real."