Adam ‘Flex’ Maxted Explains How ‘Stripping’ Led To Him Not Being Signed By NXT UK

In September 2020, a report came out indicating that Adam ‘Flex’ Maxted was close to signing with NXT UK.

Unfortunately, the signing never happened and it was due to Maxted’s background in “stripping.” 

Speaking to Bodyslam’s Tea and Tights podcast, Maxted explained that William Regal spoke highly of him and wanted to offer him a contract, but he had to go through a background check first. 

“So, heres where the story takes its turn,” he began. “So basically, and this is the truth, when I was younger I, when I worked in Belfast, I used to do do some work as a Buff Butler. Which involved wearing a bowtie and an apron and I’m mainly working at hen parties or you know women’s events I’m walking round with Champagne, passing their drinks, nothing crazy, and I did that because it was easy money, I was in good shape at the time, I was like 17, 18, 19, you know just trying to earn some money. So I did that, but funnily at the time I did my try out in 2017 a couple of news article came out “Belfast stripper gets WWE try out” or “Belfast stripper is close to signing with WWE” so, I didn’t think anything of those articles because I was like well no one is gonna even see those so doesn’t even matter, I knew it wasn’t true anyway, I never got fully naked, you can google my name there’s nothing like that out there, you know what I mean because I checked all this and didn’t do it any way there might be the odd picture of me in an apron? So basically background check gets done I was in Greece at the time I get the phone call from a lady that works for the WWE, she says look Adam whats this stripper thing about we need to talk about this”

Maxted continued by saying, “I pleaded my case for about 30 minutes on the phone, I didn’t do it, WWE was always the goal for me why would I want to jeopardise myself and my career by doing something silly like that when I know you can’t be naked there can’t be footage of you out there do you know what I mean I am not silly. Even when I went on love island, I portrayed myself in a certain way as I was always worried about the cameras, how I was coming across, because WWE was always the goal. The producers took me outside one day, and told me like, you’ve never sworn once on your season of love island, you’ve never said a bad word. Because I was always thinking don’t say anything silly because you know with WWE it can always come back to haunt you. “I guess this happened at a very similar time that the speaking out movement came out, so one of the emails I got was basically, you don’t want the scrutiny of “why have you released some super stars from the brand, but all of a sudden you’re signing a, a stripper?” which really got to me and really annoyed me because I know that that’s not the work that I did and it wasn’t true, yeah I did some Buff Butler’ing but there was nothing ever flashing or nothing ever involved, because I wouldn’t have done that anyway, my Mum wouldn’t have let me, let me do that stuff! Do you know what I mean?, she’d have went through me if she thought I was like, to Tom Jones, swinging it around.”

Maxted said he understood WWE’s decision even though the stripping part was not true. 

He also noted that he’s heard back from NXT UK a handful of times and that the door is not closed. 

In 2019, Drew McIntyre had plenty of praise of Maxted. You can find his full comments by clicking here.