Thekla is candid about not always being the friendliest face fans encounter when she’s traveling — and she’s not apologizing for it.
Appearing on TMZ’s Inside The Ring, Thekla explained that airports catch her completely out of performer mode. She’s just trying to get from point A to point B with a dozen things on her mind, and in those moments she’s simply a regular traveler, not “on” the way she is in the ring or at meet-and-greets.
“Something I don’t love, and I will say this, and I can be really harsh sometimes, actually, when I get stopped at the airport. It’s just not — I’m not in my zone. I got a thousand things on my mind, you know. It’s like, I’m a civilian, you know.”
She shared one specific example of a fan who kept approaching even after she’d given a clear “not right now” signal, saying she eventually turned around and gave him a blunt, sharp brush-off that visibly caught him off guard.
One time I remember I was walking and I was obviously really walking fast, you know, and I could see from the back of my eye — I had already kind of given somebody the nod, like, ‘Not now.’ And then he kept on walking, and I stopped, froze, looked him in the eye, and was like, ‘Not f***ing now,’” Thekla shared.
“He looked mortified. He might not ever talk to anybody ever again actually, because that may have been one of the worst human interactions of his life.
That said, Thekla was careful to draw a distinction that the annoyance is really about timing, not about fans themselves. She said once she’s actually settled at her gate with nothing else to do, she has no issue with people coming up to say hello.
It’s specifically the in-transit hustle having security check, boarding, grabbing a quick snack in the lounge before a flight.That’s where she doesn’t have the bandwidth for a conversation.
