Jinder Mahal addresses WWE promo where he mocked Shinsuke Nakamura for being Japanese

During an interview with Chris Van Vliet, former WWE champion Jinder Mahal addressed a promo where he mocked Shinsuke Nakamura for being Japanese. At one point in the 2017 promo, Mahal told Nakamaura that “you all rook the same.”

Here is what Mahal had to say about the promo…

“There was one promo in particular and recently, I actually just seen Shelton Benjamin tweet that if he could take back one thing in his career, it was a promo with Yoshitatsu. Same thing, kind of like a racial promo. So that day, I had the promo, I got the script from the writer, ‘This is from Vince. He wants you to say this.’ I was like, ‘Aw man, I don’t want to say this. Is there anything else we can do?’ He said, ‘No, it’s come from Vince.’ So I even asked Vince (McMahon), ‘Vince, this is gonna get negative backlash.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, no, don’t worry, who cares? It’s not you. It’s a character, just entertainment.’ So, did the promo, was not happy with it and not proud of myself for doing it. Really wish that I could take that moment back, but, unfortunately I can’t and right when we came back, it got a lot of negative backlash. I remember coming back from Gorilla — I was still hanging out by Gorilla and one of the social media managers came up to me and said, ‘Hey, this is getting a lot of bad P.R. and Vince wants for you to tweet something, like a statement.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool’ and he came up with something, maybe the P.R. team wrote it, someone. He came up with a statement and as we were about to tweet it, he said, ‘Actually, Vince changed his mind. He said no.’

So it was just one of those things where… it is what it is. Not proud of doing it. But on the plus side, I don’t think something like that, a promo like that will ever happen again in WWE. Things change, the regime changed, everything is much, much different now. That was a different era, a different time. Under Vince, his style was different and sometimes he was stuck in his ways.

“You separate the performer from the on-screen character (in movies or similar forms of entertainment) but for some reason in wrestling, in WWE, it doesn’t happen. And that’s the explanation that was given to me and I guess I was like, ‘Alright, fine. Okay, we’ll do it…’ I had asked, ‘Can we do something else? Is there anything else we can do?’ I was told, ‘No. This is what Vince wrote’ and you can either do it or you take your ball and go home.” (quote courtesy of PostWrestling.com)