Renee Paquette talks about what made her ‘unhappy’ during the end of her WWE run

During an interview with Ariel Helwani, former WWE announcer Renee Paquette talked about the end of her run with the company…

“I asked for my release several years ago, was not granted it, got to do a bunch of other things, and on the second time I was like, ‘Okay, now it’s really time to get off the ride.’ That’s the reference I come back to, getting off the ride. It’s hard to find a time to leave WWE. There’s never a perfect time. It just goes so fast. The fact that I was there for eight years makes my head spin, but it’s like ‘next show, next show, next pay-per-view, building to Mania, building to SummerSlam, this is coming up, this new opportunity,’ there’s never that time to get your foot out the other door. With my time at commentary ending, the FOX show ended, and with COVID, we’re in the middle of COVID, and I was like, ‘This is my time. I see this window and it’s my time to jump off the ride and figure it out, which is a weird time to do that because everything else was shut down so it was ‘oh shit, I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m getting off this ride.’”

“I was just unhappy in the sense of knowing that I had more to offer. I was just doing backstage interviews. I was still doing kick-off shows, but on the day-to-day, the schedule was just backstage interviews, which I actually loved doing cause it felt more to me getting to flex a little of that acting muscle and I always loved that. I loved being able to have the subtle reaction to the heel or the babyface and being able to help those storylines any way I could, but there wasn’t that other thing to sink my teeth into. There would be times where I would sit there, and I wasn’t on the show, there was no backstage interview. I would sit there, waiting for something to do and I started to feel like I was really wasting time and wasting important years of my career. Even if I was doing something on the show, it was a quick ‘Hey, welcome my guest….’ they cut me off, I’m staring off into the abyss for the camera cut. As much as I loved doing that, I know there was more that I had to offer and other things I wanted to do. It was just trying to find that right thing to do. I spoke to Kevin Dunn, I asked him for my release, and he said ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Wait, you can say no?’ I wasn’t expecting that. He was like, ‘We have other plans for you and we have things we want to do,’ I’m glad the doors didn’t close and we didn’t end our relationship at that point because there was stuff for me to do. By the time I jumped off commentary and the FOX show ended, it was time to go.” (quotes courtesy of Fightful.com)