Matt Hardy knows that inspiration can sometimes come from the most obvious places… and in this case, it’s popular culture and television.
AEW star Matt Hardy recently appeared on the Wrestling Perspective Podcast and discussed how he got the inspiration for his ‘Broken’ Matt character from some notable television shows. Hardy described how shows like HBO’s True Blood encouraged some of his character’s nuances and shared where the mindset for adapting a new persona came from.
“It comes from different places at different times, for instance whenever I did ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy a few years back, my whole mentality about that is I was getting older and I understood that I had to work differently. I couldn’t wrestle or work like I used to when I did when I was 25 years old and was a young man. So, I had to modify my game to work to my strengths and then I felt like if I commit myself to a character that’s larger than life and over the top — maybe even a little supernatural throwback to The Undertakers or Papa Shangos when those guys were around — I said if I delved into this head first and fully committed to it in any interview that I do, any promo I do and I’m in the gimmick and I talk with this weird accent,” Hardy explained, “that was motivated, in many ways by different TV shows.
“If you’ve ever seen the cartoon ‘Salad Fingers’, which is by David Firth on YouTube, it’s a very weird, strange cartoon, ‘Salad Fingers’ was a big inspiration in ‘Broken Matt.’ Also, television shows where’s there’s a lot of stuff that came out of ‘True Blood’ because I was a ‘True Blood’ fan and I thought that this was the coolest thing ever because how vampires, ya know, are immortal and they live in different time periods and different stages and you could see Eric Northman, which is Alexander Skarsgard and you know, he’s got long hair and he’s dressed as they were in the 1800s,” Hardy noted, “and then you get to see him in the early 1900s, now you see him in the current day, the 2000s and I thought that was so cool.
“I asked myself how could I integrate this into a wrestling character? Obviously, I can’t be immortal in reality, in real-life, but if I could say that something has happened. Not everybody can be shoot Gangrel but what if something happened and I broke down the barriers of my mind and I was cognizant of where my soul and where my essence has been,” Hardy explained. “I can report where everybody, every vessel has been and has followed but now I’m a professional wrestler known as Matt Hardy and that’s my current vessel that I’m just in and that was my attempt to be immortal.”
Hardy said that Broken Matt’s habit of biting came from True Blood, and he noted that he also took a lot from Dexter and True Detective as well. Hardy closed by joking about the initial reception he got from some people who saw his gimmick, adding that some thought he might have been on drugs but he was the most sober than he’d ever been.
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