Despite all the love she has for her father, Natalya modeled her WWE career on being everything Jim Neidhart wasn’t.
Natalya was the guest on Tuesday’s episode of Insight with Chris Van Vliet, promoting her new book that is set to be released on October 28. She discussed the current character evolution that she’s going through in the ring. After spending so much time just trying to make other people happy, Natalya is now focused on bringing a different side of herself with her “Nattie Neidhart” persona.
“I’ve done so many first-evers. I’ve had great matches. I’ve had monumental moments. I’ve had so much fun,” Natalya said. “But it was a character that I felt like I had to do to survive and make sure everybody was happy. I wanted to make the girls in the locker room happy. I wanted to make management happy. I wanted to make my family proud.”
Jim Neidhart (who passed away in 2018) had a Hall of Fame career in WWE as a member of The Hart Foundation, but his life was a tumultuous one and he was let go by the company multiple times. Because of that, Natalya was determined to always be dependable and do what was asked of her.
Natalya believes the difficulties her father went through were due to Neidhart suffering from brain trauma dating back to his early days playing football. That trauma also made it very challenging for Neidhart to be a good parent, but Natalya loved him unconditionally through all of his flaws.
“I wanted to just, you know, be everything that my dad wasn’t,” she said. “Which, you know, my dad wasn’t — he wasn’t stable. He wasn’t reliable. He was going through, which I talk about in the book, he was going through the hardest times of his life, suffering from — my dad had a very serious brain injury. And nobody knew that, but I just knew growing up, like, he got let go from WWE so many times. I was like, I am bound and determined to be everything everybody needs from me so I’ll never be like my dad and I’ll never let anybody down.”
When Natalya re-signed with WWE in 2024, she did so knowing that she still wanted to grow and evolve in her career. She is less of a people-pleaser than she used to be, and it’s been liberating for her to showcase her authentic self as “Nattie Neidhart” outside of WWE in promotions like GCW Bloodsport and the NWA. The persona is a more gritty and ruthless version of who fans have come to know her as.
Natalya said WWE and Paul “Triple H” Levesque have been very supportive in giving her permission for these outside appearances. Her hope is that she can now parlay her new character into WWE.
“While it’s taken me a long time for my ship to really come in, I really want to go on a powerful run in WWE. That’s my goal. That’s my dream,” she said.
