Anne Victoria Clark, writing for Vulture, has a great profile of AEW wrestler, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF).

In the world of professional wrestling, shoot is a term for a performer going off script — usually in a very bad way. When CM Punk, star of three-year-old wrestling promotion AEW, decided to start hurling insults at AEW management during a press conference in September and followed it up with a very real locker-room altercation, it was a shoot — one that would get Punk indefinitely suspended and his AEW World Championship title vacated. This kicked off a tournament to crown a new face of the promotion, during which one of the company’s biggest villains, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF) has emerged as its biggest hero.

Friedman’s persona in the ring is, to put it bluntly, that of an asshole. He wears a Burberry scarf all the time. His tag line is “I’m better than you, and you know it.” He calls people “poors.” He constantly refers to himself as a “generational talent” and “the devil” (his fans are “devil worshippers”). And perhaps worst of all, he’s proudly from Long Island. Parents bring their children to gleefully be insulted by him, fans wait in line for him to scowl in photos and call them names, and people deliberately troll him and bring him homemade gifts to ruin. (In one video, after he drops a fan’s autograph sheet and storms off, the fan yells out, “That’s better than an autograph, bro. You’re the man!”)

I was lucky enough to have met MJF when he was out of character and I found him to be a delightful, smart, and charismatic individual. He was very high on AEW and what the company could create.