Bea Priestley

Bea Priestley is bright and cheerful even at 9am on a Monday morning. A long way from what fans expect from her. To them she is a hard nosed bad girl, but on the other end of a Skype call is a very confident young woman who is keen to talk to James Truepenny about her past, her influences and her immediate future.

“The battery died in the remote control, and it landed on Raw, I thought it was cool.” Priestly explains as she details what got her started on her wrestling fandom. “Then the next night Chris Jericho was on Smack down getting ready for his steel cage match with Edge, and I just fell in love with Jericho.”

Having grown up in a totally non wrestling household, this was quite a switch for her family to get used to. Priestly moved from fan to participant very quickly. “I badgered my parents to let me do it and they were like ‘No’. At 16 I explained that there was a school I could get to by train, I had a part time job that could pay for everything. So Mum said I could do it, but because they didn’t like it they weren’t going to pay for it. Which was fair enough.”

Priestley began her training at New Zealand Wide Pro Wrestling, having spent 18 months training in Wellington, she moved on to Auckland where she would be trained by Travis Banks. Six months into that training stint things came to a halt while Priestley contended with brain surgery on a benign growth. Having to move back home and recover, Priestley began watching a lot more wrestling and took heart from watching TNA’s British Bootcamp series. “It showed that the scene in England was much better and there are so many more opportunities. I am a UK citizen so I didn’t need a work visa, I’ve go family there, I’m not going to get stranded, so then it was like ‘Well bugger it! Why don’t I go?’. Having been born in York and moved to New Zealand at age ten, her dual nationality made this much more of a possibility rather than a pipe dream. It was a mature decision for a 19 year old. “Because I have two older sisters, and having been around older people a lot more, I tend to act towards their age group.