Chelsea Green Reveals Her Reaction To Matt Cardona’s Death Match With Nick Gage

In an appearance on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette, Chelsea Green talked about her first go around with Impact Wrestling. Green, who previously worked for Impact under the name Laurel Van Ness, feels now that she almost took her first run there for granted.

"I think back to my time at Impact when I was first there," Green said. "And I was the Hot Mess and I was champion and all this stuff. At the time, I just took it for granted. I thought that was what wrestling was. I was carefree, I was always happy, I never thought about my position in the company or what people thought about me because I didn't give a s**t. I was going out there being a drunk bride, wrestling without shoes on. Nobody ever critiqued me, there was no negative juju around me. And I was so naïve to think that that's what wrestling was. That wasn't what wrestling was, I was just in a time of my life where I didn't give a f**k in a great way. In a really positive way."

Green also talked about the origin of the Hot Mess character she portrayed as Van Ness, started following her failed wrestling wedding to Braxton Sutter (AEW's The Blade). She credited Impact and agent Dutch Mantel for helping to put the character together, almost on the fly that evening.

"We had no idea that was the direction it was going to go in," Green said. "We knew that the big blow off was going to be that I was going to be left at the altar. And the funny thing is, and this is so Impact, they didn't think that they gave us bottles of champagne that were real bottles of champagne. So me and I think it was Mike Bennett at the time and maybe Spud, we were up there and I had gotten left at the altar. And they had all the bottles of champagne, so they kept passing them to me. By the time the segment was over, it was really long, about twenty five minutes, I had drank about two bottles of champagne by myself. I was s***faced! So then I go to the back, we're done and we're all clapping. We're done for the week, because we record Impact in chunks of four to six weeks, so we're done with taping. And that was the big blow off for all of us. So they told me 'just quickly film a pre-tape, post segment thing.' And I was like 'no! I don't want to!' But they're like 'come on, just quickly do it, it'll be fun.'

"So I sat down in the makeup room and they wanted me on the ground. They told me to mess up my hair. And then Dutch Mantel, he always really loved the character so he said 'I want to produce this.' He said 'put your makeup on all over.' I was like 'no, what? I'm supposed to be sexy and cute.' He said 'just mess it up.' I said 'okay' and I smeared my makeup and said 'is this okay?' He said 'that's perfect. Press record!' He was like 'sing something.' I'm like 'I don't sing', but then I'm like 'alright.' I sang 'The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow', my hair was messed up, my makeup was messed up and I was drunk, so I'm actually kind of actually crying. I never thought about it again until it actually aired six weeks later. I was single at the time so I did not care what anybody thought, at all. So I came back to tapings seven weeks later and I was like 'guys we need to stay in the dress.' And they were like '100%.' All they said was 'do it crazier than you did it last time.' The dress got dirtier as weeks went on, I cut the dress, it got shorter and shorter. Everyone gave me ideas of what to incorporate. I'd come up with a champagne bottle, I'd come out with a shoe. The minute I put that dress on, I felt drunk and happy."

Green has since appeared in Impact and Ring of Honor following her WWE release, and is scheduled to appear for the NWA at their Empowerrr event later this month. As for what her goals are, Green revealed she'd like to challenge both the Impact Knockout's Champion and the AEW Women's World Champion, both close friends of hers.

"Of course I want Impact to give me the chance to take the Knockouts Championship off of Deonna (Purrazzo)," Green said. "Especially since she's my best friend and I want to work her. And of course I want to go to AEW and work Britt (Baker). That's obviously going to forever be on my to do list, those two things. And then aside from that, I really truly want to take a step back from wrestling and focus on what's going to bring me happiness for the rest of my life. As a female, we want families and we want something that our body can actually do for the rest of our lives. And wrestling ain't it."

Later Green was asked about her fiancée, Matt Cardona, wrestling a death match against Nick Gage at GCW Homecoming, where he won the GCW World Championship. It's an experience Green doesn't love, especially since she was only able to determine Cardona was okay after The IIconics and Britt Baker reached out to GCW personal for her. Even then, her nerves didn't die down till she saw him a day later.

"That was the scariest part," Green said. "I've never watched him, in the five years we've been together, I've never watched him and truly wondered if he was okay. It really bugged me that I wasn't able to be actually be there. I didn't want to be ringside watching, but I would've preferred to be there and have control over when I was able to speak to him and go to the back and fix him, or speaking for him and being like 'no he needs more stitches.' Whatever it is. That was really scary.

"I was sitting in Texas, watching it on my phone as I'm eating Italian food, seems very inappropriate. He didn't sleep that night and he was bleeding through everything and he had to get on a plane. And I'm just so stressed out having to do signings and pretending that everything is okay. Until I saw him and was in that hotel room where he bled out, and was able to patch him up, I felt sick to my stomach. But until the moment I could actually be hands on and fixing him? I was like so sick."

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription