F L A U N T
Luis and Kristen Chevere are the definition of couple goals… and their story is far from ordinary. Getting their start in the beauty industry as international hair stylists and entrepreneurial fashion designer, it wasn’t long before they both came together and bonded over their love for wrestling. Based out of San Antonio, Texas, Luis and Kristen are deemed the ultimate, multifaceted wrestling duo — pro-wrestlers at that.
Luis wrestles under his stage name Alexander Crowley, better known as a dark/evil cult leader aka The Death Dealer, while Kristen operates under Lilith Crowley. Together, they’re recognized as Cult of Crowley, with a true DIY-approach when it comes to their costumes and investing in their own entrance song. Last year, they saw much success after booking local wrestling shows, and now they’re taking their talents and passions for the wrestling universe on tour.
But it’s not just wrestling they’re good at. Most recently, Luis and Kristen conjoined forces in creating custom gear for well-known WWE wrestler Karrion Kross, which this year can be seen on his own action figure. Simultaneously, they still work as hair stylists and educators at Now Salon, proving you never have to be boxed into any one career in your lifetime.
Flaunt caught up with both Luis and Kristen via Zoom, who were located in San Antonio, Texas. Read below as we discuss their background in hair, love for the sport of wrestling, dynamic as a couple, and more!
Luis, you recently broke your collarbone in a match. That’s my worst fear!
Luis: I'm going to tell you right now, it doesn't really hurt, but it sucks. When it happens, at least for me so much adrenaline was pumping, but I knew exactly what had happened. I thought it was dislocated, which is apparently something you can't do to a collarbone. So it's been a very slow month. [laughs]
When did that happen?
Luis: It happened October 3rd, then I had surgery on this 7th. I'm a couple weeks out, then I'll have my next follow up on the 10th. That will let me know when I can go back to work, when I can start training again. It won't tell me when I can go back in the ring, but it’ll let me know when I can start slowly getting back in the gym and in my rolls, all that fun stuff. It's been a lot of napping, a lot of eating, a little sadness.
It's such a unique dynamic to go from hair to wrestling. Talk about your love for hair and how that evolved from an early age.
Kristen: Absolutely, I'll start because I've been at it longer. I initially started in the acting world, my goal was to be a full-fledged actress. Talked to some hair and makeup people on set one day, and decided that would be another realm in the acting world. If I didn't make it as an actress, I could still be in the industry. Once I got into the hair role, I fell in love of color. That's my specialty: I'm a color specialist. Opened up my own salon in 2010, and I've had that since to present. When I met Luis, he got me onto the show circuit, which he'll tell you more about because that's more his realm. That elevated my career from just being a stylist and an owner to now a platform educator, which was a whole other world I didn't even know existed. At that time, I was already 10 years in. That's where my love started and developed. I'm still known for my blondes, which is funny because I'm a natural blonde and I do this. [shows black hair]
Luis: With me, mine was a little bit less fancy. I wasn't really the best school student in high school, and by that I mean I was never there. They gave me an option, they had started a program where you could work part-time and also go to school part-time. Everything was done on computers. You didn’t have to talk to anybody, it was at your own pace. Where the school is located, there was a salon on the other side of the strip mall, so I got a job there. Before that, I was doing my friend's hair because I was a teenager. I was a receptionist and they took me to my very first hair show when I was 16 or 17. I saw all of these people doing hair on stage, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. That’s what drew me to doing hair.
When I finally went to hair school, I was about 20. I moved around a bit, then lived in Chicago for about 6 or 7 years before I moved here. That's really where I started taking hair really seriously. I got in contact with some hair companies. The first company I worked with was a company that sold scissors, I started my education in hair with them. We've been really fortunate to be able to travel the country, teaching to other professionals, salons, barbershops. We've gotten super lucky to be able to be the first Americans to do Salon International in London, which is their biggest hair show they do there. We did a Barber Expo in Ireland, in Montreal, Canada.
The biggest one and the furthest one I got to do was in Moscow, Russia. That was weird, in a cool way because it wasn’t what you’d expect. It was 50% tattoo convention, 50% hair. I got to meet people like Ami James from Miami Ink, which is really cool and very nice. He's a lot more soft-spoken than he is on TV. That one was cool because I got to do something that I love in front of thousands of people, essentially teaching the methods that I took and that have made me successful with my clients. We did a lot, we did quite a bit with hair. It’s a lot of fun but now, it's a little bit more artistic. I like to teach stuff that you can take back to the salon to do on your own clients. Now it's more avant garde stuff that’s not super transferable, that's when we decided to switch lanes.
Right, how did your love wrestling come into fruition?
Luis: I’ll let you do your part first.
Kristen: He lets me do it because I tell elaborate stories. [laughs] I moved to Texas in 1998, you either liked sports like football or wrestling. That was the only two big ones when we were kids. I heard these two boys talking about wrestling and I wanted to know what they’re talking about. I ended up watching Raw that night and I fell in love because to me, it was like a soap opera with fighting. There were these crazy storylines. At the time, it was The Undertaker and Stephanie McMahon. They had this one-sided lover’s situation going on. I fell in love with the acting side of it mainly. Of course, I lived down the street from Stone Cold Steve Austin, his family lived in San Antonio at the time. Meeting him was really exciting moment for me.
Fast forward to us dating, he went to school for it. I didn't know I didn't know any aspect of that side of the world, you could go to a training facility and then become a professional wrestler. I can't wrestle because of a childhood injury, but I can manage. That's a big side of the wrestling world that went away for a little bit, but is now making a comeback. Managers are starting to be more proactive in the world again. For me, that's where I come in. I bring the acting side to the world: where he's amazing in the ring, I draw in the fans on the outside of the ring.
How did you move into this space where you're managing him?
Kristen: That was because he's horrible in front of the camera.
Luis: I'm not horrible. I'm just not as good... you can't put a mic in front of me and interview me, because it doesn't compute as well.
Kristen: Where that part comes natural to me. In real life, we already play off of each other. We thought it’d be a great dynamic to bring a real married couple into this world as well.
Luis: With me, I grew up in Puerto Rico. I was born and raised there until I was about 11, then we moved to the States when I was in sixth grade. In Puerto Rico, wrestling is really big. It's more like Lucha Libre, which is the Spanish version of it. All the guys are masked, I've always loved it. I've watched it since I was 6 years old, it's something I've always had a passion for. Honestly, I wanted to do that before I got into hair. Before I got into hair school, I tried a wrestling school out back when I lived in Florida.
I was 19, so you're not really the most responsible person ever. At least I wasn't. This place was quite far from where I lived at the time. I had a junky little Honda Civic that didn’t like long drives, it crapped out and I couldn't attend anymore. The hair school I attended was a 5-minute drive, that's how I felt into hair. When I moved to Chicago, I tried looking for wrestling schools, but at the time, they were too far. It’s Chicago, you don't need a car. There's trains and buses. Once I moved here, we started doing some research. I found the school we graduated from called Hybrid School of Wrestling, they're here in San Antonio. I trained there for about 2.5 years, and graduated about a year ago.
She came in 8 months after I did. That’s when we decided “if you want to do this, let's train together.” That way you can see what I do in the ring and we can work everything off. It's been really fun. It's been really cool to be able to move from one industry to another and still be able to do it together. We always hear, “Oh well, you might get an offer with a contract from the company. They're going to say, ‘we want you, but we don't want her’. Or ‘we want to separate you guys. Are you going to say no?’” Yeah, I'm going to say no. That's cool, that's money, but we don't want to do things separately. We want to do things together. It’d be nice to get a million dollar contract, but if it's going to take me away from her, I'd rather not.
What do you feel when you wrestle?
Kristen: It's exciting. The crowd depends on what role we're playing that night. You could be a good guy or bad guy, but you feed off the crowd. You could come in thinking you're a good guy, then the crowd hates you for some reason and you have to fully change up our dynamic of how you interact with the fans. Me personally, I'm on the ring side so I watch him in his fights. The hits are very real and very loud when you're right next to them. From my perspective as a wife, you see him get hit like, “Oh no!” But then as the manager, you're going in like, “No, he's going to hit it back harder. It'll be fine.” For me, it's more adrenaline and excitement.
Luis: It's the same for me. You discuss everything that's going to happen with the person you're going to wrestle, everything's very safe. Obviously as we can see by my arm, accidents do happen. A lot of the time, people will tell you, “okay, you're going to be a bad guy. He's going to be the good guy.” But you go out there and if the fans boo him, it's no longer what was said in the back. You gotta feed off the crowd because you're there to entertain them. Your main thing is making sure everything you do entertains them. That it's safe, that it's timed properly, and that it looks real.
Sometimes, you get stiffed a little. Somebody might accidentally forearm you in the jaw when they’re aiming for your neck, little things like that wakes you up. I've had moments where I wrestled one of my best friends and he chipped one of my molars. Things like that happen. One guy gave me an elbow and I saw little stars, that sucked. A lot of times when you're wrestling well-experienced people, they’ll see your eyes like, ”okay we gotta slow down, because he’s gotta get his bearings back.” There is alot of nerves. When you're waiting behind that curtain to come out and to see how the fans are going to react, remembering “okay, we've gotta make sure these are the top spots we're doing in this match.” Because they're going to show your talent and my talent.
To me, my favorite part of it is the reaction, the love or hate you may get from the crowd. A lot of it comes to the backstage stuff, not only getting the respect from your peers but also getting the respect from the promoter who runs the company. We've been very lucky to work very close to a lot of these promoters where they want to bring us in, we’ll shoot them some ideas. They really like it, they're into it. We love storytelling. I don't want to get into a show and do a match with somebody, then cool. Great match, but where do we go from there? Are you going to put me in with somebody else randomly? So I always like to pitch ideas. Now I’ve wrestled him, what’s that going to lead to? Are we going to do another one? Are we going to tell a story when working up the ranks to a title?
I was lucky enough to receive a title, I have a title for a company here. It's really special to us because of the short time we've been in it. It shows people see what we're capable of when it comes to storytelling, visuals, how much we've invested in this. Besides the training we've done, we've invested in our own personal music. Once we get this house situated, I'm looking into getting the name trademarked. We make our own gear, which is the costumes that we walk to the ring or where in the ring. If we can't do it, we'll pay a decent amount of money to get high quality stuff done. There’s a lot of different things that we've invested in. 9 times out of 10, when we do shows, I don’t wear the same things. I try to do different things for different brands or different shows, to give that little bit of spice to the personas.
What are you guys most excited for next?
Luis: Once I heal, that's going to be the big thing: healing. I'm at that point where ugh, I'm going nuts. Luckily, I had my follow up and that allowed me to start sewing again. It's not very strenuous on the collarbone or the shoulder area, so that's allowed me to mix and start working on some stuff for us when we return to the ring. I'm making some stuff for friends, that's allowing me to make money that I've lost not being able to do hair.
We're having some stuff revamped for when we're able to come back, we're changing the look a little bit. I'm talking to the producer who helped us do our song to switch things up a little bit. One of my best friends is a really amazing videographer, he does really good video. We've scheduled some stuff with him and a couple of other videographers, hopefully for next weekend to start creating a visualization of us returning to the ring, a story of a reborn and what people can possibly expect when we're able to return.
Kristen: As far as what’s next, more titles.
Luis: More titles is definitely big. Once we get the comeback story working, being produced and being put out to the fans and the public, I've got a list on my Twitter of local companies I want to work with. Expanding the brand, expanding us, seeing how much we can do within the state first. That's the way I look at it: Texas is huge, there's tons of wrestling brands here. We want to get in as many of them as we can, then start working nationally and internationally. See where we can go with wrestling.
Anything else you want to let the people know?
Kristen: Look for us. [laughs]
Luis: Keep an eye on what's to come in the next couple of months. As I physically heal, it's going to give us a lot of more theatrical aspects of the industry that a lot of people don't really take into consideration. Doing more videos and artistic things. It's not all about what's done in the ring, there's so much more outside of it. There's a lot of stuff we've got in mind for the upcoming months, we're really excited.
