The sun is shining and there’s a nice breeze coming off the Long Island Sound, but Maxwell Jacob Friedman doesn’t seem to care. We’re waiting for sushi at a ritzy harborfront restaurant, but the current world champion of All Elite Wrestling, known to fans by his initials, MJF, is in a bad mood, lingering on a sour interaction with a fellow wrestler. He should be all smiles: last night, Friedman beat opponent Samoa Joe in front of his hometown crowd, even after Joe dropped him shoulder-first into the apron, chucked him through a wooden table, and smashed his head into the exposed floor. When it was all over, Samoa Joe, one of the fiercest wrestlers of the last 20 years, stuck out his hand for Friedman to shake. It was a classy gesture—but today, Friedman sees it another way.
“I hate that piece of shit, I hate his guts,” he says with the sort of sneering bravado his fans have come to expect on TV—but that I’m surprised to hear the day after a match. As wrestling has become more family-friendly over the last decade, cursing has mostly gone the way of steel chair shots to the head—but MJF routinely cuts a blue streak on the mic—just one of the many things that make Friedman stand out, along with an in-the-ring skillset that could work in almost any decade of professional wrestling. He’s figured out a formula that has not only helped him reach the top of AEW, and become must-see TV in the process.
And his dislike of Samoa Joe isn’t a work. He wants people to know how much he truly dislikes his opponents. “That’s what makes it interesting,” he says. “It’s visceral. You can see that through the screen and I'm making you have an emotional response. Other guys in our sport, they're beating the shit out of each other and hitting moves that look crazy. And if you listen to the crowd, they'll come up when the big thing happens. But you'll also hear the big gaps of silence because they're not emotionally invested in the participants.” The difference as he sees it is simple: “You're emotionally invested in MJF, and you're emotionally invested in anybody I get in the ring with because I give you no choice. I'm involved, and you care about what I'm doing because you care about me.”
Friedman is AEW’s first true homegrown superstar, emerging as Tony Khan’s promotion has gone from an intriguing upstart to the first real rival the WWE has had in decades. When we meet, he’s been the champ since November of 2022. All-time great wrestlers praise him for his skills—but so do Pulitzer Prize-winning critics. In the last few years, he’s participated in some of the best matches in the industry and has held multiple titles. Just 27, he’s young to have the sort of resume he already has. His few peers in that regard are legends: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson won his first world title at the same age (26), while Randy Orton, the youngest world champ in history, won at just 24. But the big difference between Friedman and those two all-time greats is that The Rock and Orton are third-generation wrestlers, sons, and grandsons of other all-time greats. Friedman, meanwhile, showed up to college on a football scholarship, realized right away it wasn’t what he wanted to do, dropped out (much to his parents' horror), and started at the bottom. A kid from a nice Jewish family on Long Island, not even six feet tall, Friedman made up for what he lacked in physique with an ego the size of Billy Joel’s Oyster Bay mansion. When I ask how he’s doing, hours removed from his victory over Samoa Joe, he responds, “Brother. I woke up larger than life this morning.”
The history of wrestling is filled with guys whose gimmick is that they’re more famous, sophisticated, or well-off than everybody else. It’s a tricky line to walk: Ted DiBiase’s Million Dollar Belt was really made with cubic zirconium and not diamonds like he claimed in the ‘80s, while Triple H took ill-fated turns as a French Canadian aristocrat named Jean-Paul Lévesque and the “Connecticut blueblood” Hunter Hearst Helmsley before going the leather jacket-and-Motörhead route. Friedman’s schtick is a savvy reworking of that model: the character of MJF, a guy who grew up in one of the nicer parts of Long Island and really doesn’t care what anybody thinks, isn’t all that far removed from who Friedman is himself. His catchphrase? “Better than you.”
His hair has a lot of gel in it, and he wears a Burberry scarf to ring as a signature look. “I made Burberry cool again. Before me, it was only worn by people who were trying too hard,” he says as he picks up a piece of sushi with his chopsticks. Lots of other wrestlers, meanwhile, earn “cheap heat” by trashing a local sports team—but Friedman takes his dislike of all places but Long Island to another level. I ask if he recalls his first time going out of town. “I was miserable,” he says. “Then when I started wrestling, I had to get in my car and drive to places like Kentucky, Indiana, and Dayton, Ohio.” He pauses for a second and shakes his head before continuing down the list. “Orlando, Florida. Tampa, Florida. Ybor City, Florida. Most of the Florida places are gross, but I'll just never forget just leaving and being like, ‘Oh, every place else sucks.’” To get a sense of just how far he’s willing to take it, just watch the video of Friedman in the middle of the ring during a commercial break during a match in Texas. The show isn’t on the air, but he’s telling the crowd to boo all they want and calling them pieces of shit—before adding that, if abortion was legal in their state, then the fans maybe wouldn’t have to worry about him offending so many children with his language. It’s political commentary little seen in professional wrestling—a little bit Don Rickles, and a little bit of Andy Kaufman, too.
Friedman first caught the bug when he was a little kid, around six. He saw Brock Lesnar beat The Rock for the title at SummerSlam in 2002, and even when he tells that story there’s a cocky twist about how old it makes other fans feel. “When they hear that, it almost hurts them,” he says. “When they talk about their childhood wrestler, maybe it’s Bruno Sammartino, Hulk Hogan, or The Rock, and I’m over here talking about Brock as the guy when I was a kid. It makes people sick.” Unlike previous generations who had to depend on magazines to tell them wrestling news and had to hunt for weeks and months to find tapes of matches in promotions that maybe weren’t televised in their part of the country, Friedman had YouTube. He started watching as much wrestling as he could, old and new. “That’s another huge advantage I have, humbly,” he says. “I didn’t grow up like the older guys trading tapes. I’d kill someone if I had to wait for the mail to deliver me a tape. It would drive me insane.”
His exploring led him to old videos of WWE legend "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, and his first true hero. Piper just didn’t care about the rules; he was positioned as a bad guy, but you couldn’t take your eyes off of him. Friedman saw a bit of himself in other legends, too, like Eddie Guerrero, Ric Flair, and Dusty Rhodes. “Dusty got fucking down and dirty every now and then. He wasn’t always fighting clean,” Friedman notes.
Perhaps because of all that careful study, Friedman has pulled off the rare feat that “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and The Rock were able to accomplish during the late-1990s: he’s become one of the sport’s biggest stars while remaining the trash-talking, rule-bending antihero that fans can’t get enough of. You see it every single time he fights: the fans want to hate him, but once things get going, they can’t help but root for him. And he knows it. “There's a level between being able to put your hands up like two kangaroo paws and a crowd literally freaks out and screams at the top of their lungs,” he says of a move he’s added to his repertoire in the last few months. The Kangaroo Kick is exactly what it sounds like, with Friedman jumping up in the air and kicking his opponent feet-first mimicking the marsupial the move is named after. “Other guys have to do something like a reverse hurricanrana off the top rope to the floor to elicit the same noise level. That's the difference between me and everybody else.”
I look at my watch to see how I’m doing on time. I drove over an hour in Long Island traffic to meet Friedman, and I’ve likely got two more ahead of me on the way back since it’s rush hour. The glance seems to annoy the champ, who is still in pain from the previous night. I interrupted his thinking. He shoots me a glance before finishing his thought about why people like him so much. “Nobody wants to cheer for a dude who's squeaky clean,” he says. “I think there's a reason why Superman movies have almost never hit, bro. I love Superman, but Batman's where it's at because Batman's more interesting. There's more depth there. The guy's not perfect, and that's something that everyone can relate to.”
Then Friedman gets up to leave, letting me know he’s done with me. I watch as he shares a friendly exchange with the restaurant hostess and walks out to the parking lot. He takes pictures with some locals, signs a few autographs, gets into his green Porsche Taycan, and peels out. I stop by the hostess, too, and ask if the wrestler is one of the more famous celebrities that stop in. She laughs and tells me it’s always nice having Mr. Friedman in. And then she repeats what the entire crowd chants when MJF wrestles these days: “He’s our scumbag.”