Sasha Banks, from WWE to The Mandalorian and beyond, wont be stopped: I want my face on

Sasha Banks takes on all comers.

That could be a freestyle rap battle. That could be a shootout with the Galactic Empire’s stormtroopers. That could be fighting for a WWE championship inside Hell in a Cell. That could mean doing two of those in the same week. There’s no backing down.

She’s at movie premieres, like the latest “Spider-Man” movie. She’s at award shows, nominated for a Kids’ Choice Award next month. She’s on popular shows like “Wild ‘N Out” and “Hot Ones.” She was in the opening for the College Football Playoff national championship. She won’t yet, however, reveal if she’s in another season of “The Mandalorian.”

Simply put, Sasha Banks (real name Mercedes Varnado) is everywhere. The sharp eyes, the colorful hair, the strut, the self-confidence. It’s hard to miss.

If it seems like she’s doing everything at once, it’s because she is.

“I want my face on the posters,” she told The Athletic. “I want people buying tickets to see Sasha Banks.”

It’s sometimes hard to know where Varnado ends and where the Banks character begins, but that’s the point. The old adage in wrestling is that the best characters are the real-life personality cranked up to 11. With Banks, who also goes by the nickname “The Legit Boss,” there’s a confidence that she owns every room she walks into.

Oh, and Snoop Dogg is her cousin. That’s real, or what people in wrestling would call “a shoot.”

“Wrestling and WWE can really let you be anything you want,” the 30-year-old said.

That’s an important distinction. Banks is, first and foremost, a wrestler at heart. For all of her growing celebrity, nothing — not even an appearance in “Star Wars” — can match walking to the ring for a WrestleMania match, which Banks will do this weekend for the seventh time.

She’s a six-time WWE women’s champion. A year ago, Banks and Bianca Belair became the first Black women to main event a night of WrestleMania. This Sunday, as part of the two-night event, she’ll compete for the WWE women’s tag team championships — a title she willed into creation in 2019. The show will stream live on Peacock.

Early in her WWE career, Banks had a charisma and skill that would resonate. The company had big plans for her. But it was also clear to those paying close attention that she could reach an even higher level.

Now she’s here to take over the entertainment world, perhaps like a certain wrestler before her.

“We might be seeing the birth of the first truly transcendent female wrestler since Wendi Richter and Moolah were headlining on MTV,” wrestling historian David Shoemaker wrote for Grantland in 2015, adding, “It’s easy to say that Sasha could be Sable popular and Trish Stratus talented, but that misses the point.

“Sasha could be the next Rock.”

Snoop Dogg saw it in her right away, but getting there was tough.

Banks likes to say there was no Plan B, C, D or E for her life. It was always going to be wrestling. She’d first caught it when she was 2 or 3 years old, watching with her dad. She began filling her notebooks with the results of every wrestling show she watched. At 8 years old, she told her famous cousin she would become a professional wrestler. He took her to a few shows when he could, like WrestleMania 24 in Orlando in 2008.

“She was real young, but I was taking her around to meet her favorite wrestlers, watching how she reacted to them,” Snoop Dogg said in the WWE-produced series “Evil.”

“She was infatuated but professional at the same time. It was fascinating to me.”

But outside of those rare trips, it was a difficult upbringing. Banks was born in California but moved around a lot. Part of her childhood came on a farm in Iowa, where she was the only person of color in town. Her dad, Reo Varnado, wasn’t around anymore, and her mom struggled to hold a steady job. Her younger brother Joshua has autism and was diagnosed with tuberous sclerosis complex, a rare disease that causes benign tumors to grow around the body. It’s why the family kept moving, because they needed different hospitals. They lived in a hotel in Minnesota for more than two years.

“I didn’t have friends growing up,” Banks said. “Because of my brother’s disabilities, I was ashamed to show him off, and I was so afraid of people making fun of him. Living in a hotel and not having my mom have work, not having much food to eat, all I had was wrestling to make me happy.

“’SmackDown’ on Thursday and ‘Monday Night Raw,’ those were the times I looked forward to my future, because I dreamt of being a WWE superstar. That kept my dreams alive.”

At 12 years old, Banks told her mother she would move to online school to help take care of Joshua, so her mom could work a steady job and her brother wouldn’t have to be bullied in school. It furthered her difficulty to make friends. But it was helpful for the family, and she quickly figured out it was helpful for her wrestling dreams.

“I would type the questions on Google, type in the answer and then go to forums and YouTube to watch wrestling,” she said.

There, she found women’s wrestling in Japan, which was nothing like she’d seen in America. Instead of pillow fights and bikini contests, a staple of WWE women’s wrestling in the late 1990s, these women were athletes just like the men. It was everything she wanted. By age 13, the family had moved to Boston, and Banks began applying to wrestling schools for training. They all told her the same thing: not until you’re 18. She tried an MMA class in the meantime, an idea she found from pro wrestler Rob Van Dam.

Finally, a week before her 18th birthday, there was a fantasy camp tryout at Chaotic Wrestling in Boston. She spent weeks training and getting in shape, ready to finally start her dream. At church, she asked the congregation to pray for her to win, because she wouldn’t be able to pay for wrestling training otherwise.

“They all laughed at me,” she said.

She showed up to the camp and quickly realized she was the only woman there. And the other guys were mostly overweight.

Banks won the fantasy camp, earning her three free months of training. She returned to church the next week to tell the group she had gotten it, and she thanked those that prayed for her. Most people in the congregation remained confused what this was about.

She made her wrestling debut for the company in 2010. Starting out as “Mercedes KV” with her real name and initials, it was quickly evident she was bound for bigger things.

“I remember her wrestling in this independent league, trying her hardest to get to the WWE, doing good and having these great fights,” Snoop Dogg said.

In 2012, she earned a tryout with WWE. This was it. This was going to be her big break. Even still, people around her didn’t quite understand the appeal. Her thin physique was certainly not the imagery of Hulk Hogan that people had in mind with wrestling. But she liked when people laughed at her. On the flight to Florida for the tryout, she listened to Nicki Minaj’s “Moment 4 Life” on repeat to get into the right headspace. Once again, she got the gig, landing in WWE’s developmental system, NXT.

Four years after she started training, 10 years after she dropped out of in-person school, she had reached the WWE. But that was only half the battle. She had to figure out how to stay there. “Mercedes” wasn’t going to cut it.

Pro wrestling is both an athletic competition and a soap opera. Fans need to connect to a character. Nobody connects with someone who’s just happy to be here. Banks needed to dig down and find something.

She thought about the personalities she was drawn to growing up. Then it came to her. Kanye West. Floyd Mayweather Jr. Nicki Minaj. And of course, her cousin.

To see Banks now is to see a woman with all the confidence in the world. A woman who feels like she deserves everything and takes whatever she wants. A woman who was born for the big stage. But that had always been kept tucked away.

“When I was younger, I never demanded attention. We were always hidden in my family. I didn’t want to be seen,” Banks said. “When I got to the WWE, you have to be seen. You have to be heard. So I wanted to be larger than life.”

The name Sasha Banks was mashed together. Sasha originally had a different last name, and Banks originally had a different first name. It came together as Sasha Banks. Her mother didn’t like it. It sounded like a porn star, she thought.

The “Boss” nickname was easy. She’d grown up seeing people call Snoop Dogg the boss. She wanted to be on that level. So now she was The Boss.

“Sasha Banks is everything I want Mercedes to be,” she said in “Evil.”

With the character set, the wrestling took over again. Banks liked to lie, cheat and steal, much like her wrestling hero Eddie Guerrero. She became the top heel in NXT, and she won the NXT women’s championship in 2015.

“Being the Boss, sometimes you got to do what you got to do,” Snoop Dogg said. “That’s what makes her who she is. She’s willing to take that chance and be different and be on the dark side.”

NXT was all about Banks, but something bigger was happening too. Banks, Charlotte Flair, Becky Lynch and Bayley were making waves within WWE for their wrestling ability. They became known as the “Four Horsewomen,” a play on Ric Flair’s famous Four Horsemen wrestling group. In the summer of 2015, Banks and Bayley had what many consider to be the greatest women’s match in wrestling history.

At the main roster level, WWE was not far removed from the kind of “wrestling” that was more about objectifying women instead of athletic ability. The company would rather hire models than wrestlers.

“I remember preparing myself, buying bikinis at Victoria’s Secret before I got down to Tampa,” Banks said. “I remember thinking, ‘If I have to do a couple of these matches, I’m going to do it, but when it comes to wrestling, I’m going to show I’m the greatest.’”

That started to change. Banks credits Triple H, the former wrestler who was then in charge of NXT, for helping shift the mindset. That famous Banks-Bayley match was not the main event of the show, but at NXT’s next pay-per-view, Banks and Bayley closed the show with the first iron woman match in WWE history.

The momentum continued when the Banks and the other three were elevated to the main roster. To that point, women had only main-evented one notable WWE show in history, an episode of ‘Raw’ in 2004. Led by Banks, the walls were about to break down.

In 2016, Banks and Flair became the first women in WWE history to main-event a pay-per-view show. It was also the first women’s Hell in a Cell match. In January 2018, Banks was the first entrant in the first women’s Royal Rumble. A few weeks after that, she was in the first women’s Elimination Chamber match. That October, WWE held its first all-women pay-per-view. Now, women regularly get the main event of shows.

“It’s so crazy that it’s not even a thought anymore,” Banks said. “It’s crazy it doesn’t have to be first times anymore. It’s just a ‘Raw’ and ‘SmackDown’ that women get to show exactly what they do best and put people in seats. That’s what I want to do every single week. To create so much history in a short amount of time, every year, I feel like I leave a stamp of history.”

Banks helped change wrestling, and now people outside wrestling were starting to take notice of The Boss.

Sasha Banks at WrestleMania 37. (Joe Camporeale / USA Today)

In early 2018, Banks began to go mainstream. She appeared on MTV’s “Total Request Live” to talk about music and wrestling. She appeared on “Hot Ones,” a famous YouTube show where celebrities eat spicy wings and share their story. Late in the year, she appeared on MTV’s “Wild ‘N Out” to show off some freestyle rap skills.

“These are things I grew up watching,” she said. “TRL, seeing Nick Cannon and being part of these shows, it was like, wow. Because of WWE, because of the platform, it gave me eyes.”

Very quickly, one thing led to another. Jon Favreau, a Hollywood movie director who directed films like “Iron Man,” was now working on a “Star Wars” show, “The Mandalorian.” He watched Banks on “Hot Ones” and immediately saw something he liked. Not long after, Banks was scrolling through her Twitter direct messages and found one from a talent agency saying a Disney show was looking to cast her.

“I was like, no freakin’ way,” she said. “There was no blue checkmark. I sent it to my manager. A few weeks later, I get a call that Jon Favreau wants to FaceTime me in 20 minutes. He told me about “The Mandalorian” and that he’d love for me to be a part of the show in any way possible. My mouth was on the floor.”

Favreau wrote Banks’ character, a Mandalorian named Koska Reeves, specifically for Banks.

“Clearly her persona had a lot of flair, and I thought it’s really good for this show to have somebody playing a Mandalorian who had all of that fierceness and energy and also physicality,” Favreau said in a behind-the-scenes feature for the show. “When you’re breaking a new character in that doesn’t have roots or history in any of the other ‘Star Wars’ media, you really want to make a strong impression.”

On set, Banks learned what other pro wrestlers who moved into acting figured out: What they do every week in wrestling translates to this field, as well.

“Wrestling is acting. It’s SNL. We are live, doing things on the fly,” Banks said. “Sometimes we get handed a script five minutes before we go out there, and you can’t memorize it right when it’s handed to you. We’re performing these things off the cuff and feeling. When it came to ‘The Mandalorian’ and transitioning from WWE, it was honestly so easy. Sometimes they would make changes on the fly and I wouldn’t stress, because Vince (McMahon) does that to me every week.”

There was no time off in wrestling, either. She pulled double duty and filmed the show around her wrestling schedule.

“That girl would go fight Friday night for WWE and take off her blue hair, get on a plane, fly overnight (to Los Angeles) and get her Koska hair sewn in,” Mandalorian actress Katee Sackhoff said on the “Inside of You” podcast. “When she got to the hotel, she would come to work and work for like three days, and she’d get on a plane and fly back for another fight that weekend. It was crazy.

“Hardest worker in the business. Works her butt off.”

While she was “Sasha Banks” in many of those celebrity appearances, the credits for “The Mandalorian” listed “Mercedes Varnado.”

It was a much-needed reminder of who she was.

In early 2019, Banks tried to quit WWE.

She had worked so hard to legitimize women’s wrestling, and the company was about to finally add women’s tag team championships. She and Bayley were expected by fans to be the first winners of the titles. When Banks separated her shoulder in a match against Ronda Rousey in January, she didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t want anything to happen that could scrap the plans for the belts.

“I had a Make-A-Wish the next day, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t put my clothes on, couldn’t do my hair,” Banks said. “Bayley had to come into my room and do that. I didn’t want to tell anybody. Those titles meant so much to me.”

She couldn’t hide it for long, and WWE doctors performed an MRI. Thankfully, she could still compete. In February, Banks and Bayley became the first winners of the women’s tag team belts.

But less than two months later, they lost the titles at WrestleMania 35, reportedly a last-minute script change by McMahon. A mix of frustration over losing those titles so quickly and what Banks called depression had become too much. Despite so much wrestling success, she felt burnt out.

She was losing her identity in the character. She didn’t remember what her actual hair color looked like. She had only ever wanted this life. She’d had all kinds of success. Now she felt like she wanted something else. She asked McMahon for her release.

He said no. Instead, he told her to take 30 days off and figure things out.

“I felt so sad every day, and I didn’t know why,” Banks said. “I had to take myself away from a situation and such a fast world where I had to stop and realize who Mercedes was and who Sasha Banks was. I had no time off. I never got to see myself, my family. I took that time to figure out what I loved besides wrestling.”

Thirty days became four months. But she rediscovered how much she indeed loved wrestling. She went over to Japan for a week to train with some of her old idols. She also remembered what Mercedes likes outside of wrestling. K-pop music. Japanese anime cartoons like “Sailor Moon.” Friends and family.

She returned to WWE in mid-2019 and found herself again. This time, the hair was blue — and it was a wig. Snoop Dogg had introduced her at her first WrestleMania entrance, and now her theme song was remixed to include some of his rapping. She paired with Bayley to win the women’s tag team titles again in 2020, and she was named Sports Illustrated’s Wrestler of the Year. After main-eventing the first night of WrestleMania a year ago, she’s attempting to win her third tag team championship this year, teaming with Naomi.

She continues to make more appearances outside of wrestling. She returned to “Hot Ones” last fall. She was the star of a sci-fi vignette on ESPN to open this year’s College Football Playoff national championship game. Though she said last fall she would not be in the next season of “The Mandalorian,” she would not confirm or deny when asked by The Athletic. To add, she’s been nominated for Favorite Female Sports Star in Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards, alongside names like Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Chloe Kim. That show airs on April 9.

Growing up, Banks never imagined a life outside of wrestling. At just 30 years old, she’s already accomplished almost all there is to do in WWE, everything she could have imagined. Asked if she sees a career in acting like wrestlers before her, she thinks it’s only just begun.

“I think I can in such a different way,” she said. “I see The Rock as maybe the biggest global superstar, and John Cena is coming right behind him. It would be cool to see a woman step into that level. I think with Sasha Banks and Mercedes Varnado right there, I think the stars are aligned for me.”

She wants to go to space one day too. Not in the “Star Wars” world, but in the real world. Don’t doubt her. Don’t be like those churchgoers who laughed at her dream 12 years ago.

“This universe keeps giving me so much more,” she said. “It’s so cool that my hard work since I was a kid is paying off. Women’s wrestling, something I wanted forever, it’s being taken seriously. I never want that to change. I want it to be something people look to and think it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever seen.”

It doesn’t matter the arena. This universe or another. Sasha Banks and Mercedes Varnado won’t be stopped.

(Top photo: Emma McIntyre / Getty Images)

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