Leah Van Dale knew how she wanted to return to WWE after more than a year away from the company to have her first child.
Van Dale, formerly Carmella, couldn’t return to the ring because her drop foot condition, which was a complication of her pregnancy and can restrict her from lifting her foot, hadn’t improved to the point she was cleared to wrestle.
So over the summer, she reached out to the tag team Pretty Deadly and WWE about working with them on screen. Van Dale said Elton Prince and Kit Wilson were on board. They came up with several pitches and storylines she communicated to one of WWE’s head writers.
“They [Pretty Deadly] were doing this musical at the time and the musical was gonna bomb and then I was going to come up and show up,” Van Dale said in a recent Zoom interview. “I was so excited. I thought it would have been the perfect mesh of our characters.”
