AJ Francis On Hosting A&E’s WWE’s Most Wanted Treasures, Hopes He Can Continue

[Liz]

AJ Francis is under contract for more WWE Most Wanted Treasures at A&E and he'd like to continue on the show, but he understands if he's replaced. The WWE alumnus spoke with Fightful's Sean Ross Sapp for an interview and talked about his experiences on the show. You can check out some highlights below:

On potentially hosting the show again: "I'm down. I'm 100% down. It's just people all the time tell me that, 'Yeah, the show wouldn't be the same without you. You were the thread for all the fans of the show.' I was like, 'Yeah, that was intentional.' The director told me, 'Yo, we're telling this story through you.'"

On being pitched by Edge to host Raw Underground: "Literally, the true story about that is, Edge calls me and he goes, 'Send me some promos.' I'm like, 'Alright.' 'Cause I'd already sent Edge a bunch of promos and stuff that we've talked about and matches. Edge is a really good guy and he's always looking to help out. I call him Adam, but yeah. He calls and he's like, 'Send me some promos.' I'm like, 'Okay.' I send him two / three promos and then he doesn't get back to me until the next day. Mind you, I'm on the road doing Most Wanted Treasures at this point. So he's like, 'We were in a meeting with Vince and other people and they were talking about who's going to host RAW Underground and I thought you'd be the perfect host for it. They were actually gonna run with you as the host, but you're on the road doing Most Wanted Treasures and that's gonna take up too much of your schedule to be able to come back and do RAW Underground.' So that's when Shane comes out as the host and then, if you really know, you got Briana, who was on RAW Underground hosting for a little bit, too. That would have been a cool opportunity, too. But honestly, I was so ingratiated in what I was doing with Most Wanted Treasures."

On A&E making the choice to use him: "The funny thing is them is WWE, they didn't actively stop me from getting the role, but they didn't want me to get it. That was an A&E and production team call. I made it to the final round of people. They asked me in March, 'Hey, would you like to be a host of a TV show?' I was like, 'Uh, okay.' I had an interview with one person on the show and then I had an interview with another person on the show and then I had an interview with Triple H and Stephanie and the director of the show. After the last meeting, WWE didn't want me to host the show because I hadn't been on TV yet. But the production team and the studio were like, 'Nah, we want him. We don't want anybody else, we want him.' Clearly, it was a good call. If you watch the show, you can tell hosting and TV stuff; I've been doing that for years."

On potentially getting replaced on the show: "They just announced that they're doing season two. They're probably not going to film until, I would think, later this year at the earliest. Last year when we did it, I found out that I got the gig in May and we started filming in July. I was the last person added to the crew that they already had set up. We gotta wait and see. I have a contract. I'm under contract for multiple seasons. Now, do they have to care about the contract? No. They can go get somebody else. But I also think—I don't mean this to be offensive, I'm just being real—anybody who watched the show can tell this, too, I'm hard to replace as a host. My little quips and ranting with Booker T in the car and rapping with him. There's not a lot of people that can do that let alone actually have experience on set. I've done SuperBowl commercials, I've done TV shows. I've done a lot of different things.

"The worst part of all of this is that I actually loved the show. They might decide, 'He's not here no more. Let's go in another direction.' If they do, more power to them," AJ continued. "I hope it works out for them. Like I said, I have no ill will. I understand how the business works. They can pay Hit Row 1.5 million dollars or they can pay Brock Lesnar 1.5 million dollars to do a show. I understand how business works. That's why they're unifying the title, because they're getting rid of that huge roster. It's what they're doing. It's business. I was in the NFL. I'm not offended by the business aspect of it. It's just if you don't want me to be a part of your business then that's fine, too. But you lose everything that I bring to the table."

On not being the focus of the show: "So if that's what you want then feel free. Use somebody else, do another show. I'm sure no matter who does the show, people are still gonna watch. 'Cause, it wasn't about me, the reason people were watching. I feel like I was the reason people kept coming back. I'm not even on the poster. They didn't watch the first episode for me. They watched it for Mick Foley. They didn't watch episode two for me, they watched it for the Undertaker. But the more they spent time with me as the thread of the show, the more time that they were able to recognize what I was able to bring to the table."