Ten matches deep: A conversation with Mylo Marinko

Image credt: @themar00481

Mylo Marinko is not far removed from his first match. Ten bouts into a career that started, then stopped, then started again, he’s already built a reputation for two very different things: fearless, high-effort work in the ring, and a series of viral videos in which he assaults his supervisor with a suplex and puts him through a sheet of chipboard.

We caught up after his trip to Thailand, a near-miss on an overseas booking, to talk about quitting wrestling, coming back to it, learning to read a crowd, and why he’d rather take a match for free than turn one down for money.

The dream that never wavered

Marinko didn’t stumble into wrestling. He grew up watching it, and the idea of doing it himself never really left.

“It didn’t waver to anything else, ever,” he says. “That was always the dream. So once I did turn 18, it’s like, well, I guess it’s time to wrestle.”

He started training at Relentless Wrestling in 2023 which is the closest school to his home in Point Cook, over the alternative of a much longer drive to Ferntree Gully. It wasn’t a hard decision geographically, but it turned into one of the best accidents of his career.

“I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. The place is so great.”

His family didn’t miss a beat either. “My brother and my dad haven’t missed a match yet,” he says, though he admits it took some getting used to, watching people who know the real him watch the character. “At home I’m not that rambunctious, that show-outie. Then having to go out into the ring and be like, I’m the man, I’m this, I’m that and they’re there watching me. It’s really weird. But I’m used to it now. I’m glad they’re there.”

Quitting was the easy part

What doesn’t come through in the highlight reels is that Marinko almost didn’t make it to a first match at all. Four months into training, he walked away.

“I still hadn’t had a practice match yet. I don’t think I can do it. I saw all the other great people there,” he says. It didn’t help that he hadn’t opened up to anyone in the room yet with no friends at the gym pulling him back in. He watched a training classmate, Shotgun (Matt Farro), who started the same week he did, take off. “He’s so damn good. Now I’m comparing myself to the same guy I started with. I’m like, damn it, I’m shit.”

He stayed away for close to a year. Convincing himself he’d made the right call didn’t last.

“As time kept going on, my brain kept going, you’re never gonna have your first match. That’s shit. I never stopped thinking about it.” Over a Christmas break, with nothing else going on, he texted one of his trainers and asked to get back into it. “Coming back was way harder than starting,” he says. “But honestly, if you’re scared of quitting, the solution is just don’t quit. That was my fear: starting again and then quitting again. Like, that’s fucking pathetic, quitting twice. The solution is just don’t quit again.”

Throwing his boss through a wall

If you’ve seen Marinko online before you’ve seen him in a ring, it’s probably because of the videos: a rotating cast of skits in which he no-sells his day job by putting his supervisor through pieces of spare flooring, pulling him out of trucks, and generally treating a construction site like an unsanctioned wrestling territory.

It started, he says, from nerves about cutting his first promo.

“It’s weird talking to a camera and putting yourself out there for the first time. So it was a bit like, what’s something funny I can do? They’re not going to say it’s embarrassing if you make them laugh.”

The chipboard idea came out of a conversation on a work site. His supervisor mentioned there was spare flooring in the garage; Marinko started throwing out lines back and forth with him until, somewhere in the process, the promo turned into a full-blown angle. It didn’t stop there either! His boss is now regularly behind the camera while Marinko works over his supervisor, and Marinko says the whole company is invested. “If my supervisor wasn’t so damn keen for them, they would have stopped by now. He loves it. He begs me to record the next one.”

The appeal of pre-tapes, he explains, is that they’re forgiving in a way a live crowd never will be. “You let yourself stuff up more because you know you can. You can just keep on redoing it until you get perfection.” A live mic is a different animal entirely. It’s instant, unfiltered feedback instead of watching a view counter climb. “There’s been times I’ve done promo classes at Relentless and just been told, no, that was pretty shit. So I’m still yet to have that microphone put in my hand in the ring. But I think I’ll be okay enough not to be dumbfounded.”

Learning to read a room

Marinko’s in-ring education has been a steady process of un-learning the instinct to just plan everything out. “I definitely get less stressed if I plan out everything,” he says, “but that gets rid of the chance for some really cool surprise moments you weren’t even expecting. Some of the best stuff comes with no preparation whatsoever.”

He points to a moment working with Tommy A, who called for some crowd-pandering hip movement mid-match. Marinko played it to one side of the room: pop. Then the other side: pop. Then straight down the middle. “That was just one thing I wasn’t planning on doing to every single side. But I heard that side, and that side, and that side.”

He’s also had the opposite lesson: watching matches back and realizing he rushed something that didn’t need rushing. “You realize you had all the time in the world. You didn’t have to rush it. It makes you realize — you can always just take a breath and no one’s gonna really bat an eye.”

Psychology, he says, took longer to click than he expected. “When I started, I was putting a match together not thinking about psychology at all. Just this move, then that move. The longer I’ve gone, it’s become a lot more, we’re going to do this, and then we’re going to get into the next sequence because of what just happened. It’s always a flow.” He’s been pulled up on it plenty: wanting to fit in a move he loves, only to be told there’s no spot for it in the story. “Well, you try it next time.”

Different rooms, different crowds

Ten matches in, Marinko has already worked Relentless’s home shows, Mayhem Pro, Peak, and MXW and each one has taught him something different about how varied Australian wrestling crowds can be. “No matter where you go, that crowd is completely different from the other place. You find that out pretty damn quickly.”

He’s candid about the nerves that come with stepping outside a home promotion. “I get scared sometimes going to other promotions, because they don’t know the Relentless style.

Relentless is so well-trained and safe. Everything I’ve learned, I credit to them.

He credits his trainers, Josh and Jax among them, for pushing everyone at the gym to get out and work as much as possible rather than getting comfortable in one room. “They beg you to go wrestle. Every class it’s who’s wrestling this weekend? If you only get used to one crowd, the first time you work anywhere else you’re gonna be like, why aren’t they cheering for my shit? You need to work everywhere. I’m going to keep on accepting bookings until I can’t.”

That philosophy nearly took him further afield than Melbourne. On a recent trip to Thailand, Marinko scouted out a local promotion that used to run shows near where he was staying but couldn’t find a booking in time, and admits he was nervous about the idea regardless. “I was shitting myself a little bit. Scared. It’s a different country, and I’m still relatively new, under ten matches. Going into a new country and going, hey, I’ve got under ten matches, how about you give me one? That sounded a little scary at first.” Still, it’s an itch he wants to scratch. “I’m so keen to work overseas. I can’t wait to be able to say I’ve done that.”

Bookings over money

Marinko is unusually blunt about where he sits in the pecking order right now, and unusually patient about it. “I still haven’t made a single dime,” he says and he’s not chasing one yet. “I don’t really want to charge anybody any money, because I want bookings more than I want money. If I go to somebody and say, cool, fifty bucks, they’re probably going to give the booking to somebody who’s free.”

He doesn’t see it as undervaluing himself so much as understanding where the value currently sits. “Right now, they’re more of value to me than I am to them. I don’t think I’m worth that value yet but I think I will be eventually, and that’s when I’ll probably start getting paid.

Every match for me is a really good rep.

What he wants people to say

Asked how he’ll know he’s made it, Marinko doesn’t reach for a title or a contract first. “It’s becoming a big name in wrestling as a whole. I don’t need to make it somewhere big, get signed but I want to become a huge name in pro wrestling. I can’t wait for the day somebody sees me somewhere completely unrelated to wrestling and goes, oh shit, that’s Mylo the wrestler. That’s when I’ll know my stuff’s getting somewhere.”

And when it’s all over? “I want them to say, damn, he was a good wrestler. First and foremost. I loved to work with him, I loved to watch him, and holy shit, did he give it his all. I don’t want there to be a ‘he could have been more if he’d just done this.’ You can’t redo that. I want it to be, he gave it his all, and he was pretty good while doing it. That’s what I want.”

Marinko is back from Thailand in time for Relentless’s Unleashed show, where he’s already trading ideas with the rest of the roster for his next angle. Ten matches in, with a supervisor who still hasn’t fully forgiven him for the chipboard, he’s not planning on slowing down.

You can find Mylo Marinko on Instagram

If you've read this far, please consider buying me a coffee! It's really expensive here in Melbourne.