Alexa Bliss has lifted the lid on what it was like to work with Windham Rotunda, the man better known as Bray Wyatt.
During the summer of 2020, Alexa Bliss joined forces with ‘The Fiend’ Bray Wyatt. The bizarre partnership between the pair began in earnest after Wyatt attacked Bliss on the July 31st edition of SmackDown.
Over the following months, Bliss adopted a number of Wyatt’s moves, as she became his supernatural sidekick.
As the partnership began to get progressively darker, Bliss took over Wyatt’s feud with Randy Orton, facing The Viper at Fastlane in March 2021. During the unconventional bout, Bliss used her supernatural powers against Orton, before Wyatt reappeared to attack the former World Champion, handing her the win.
This led to Bray Wyatt facing Orton at WrestleMania 37, in what proved to be his last match in the company.
Speaking in a new interview with Ryan Satin on the Out of Character podcast, Alexa Bliss broke down what it was like to work with Wyatt. The former Raw Women’s Champion praised the star for his dedication and creativity, adding that their partnership was the most fun she’s had in wrestling to date.
“Working with The Fiend, with Windham [Bray Wyatt], was the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire WWE career. He is so brilliant with his creativity and he puts so much effort into his character and so much research. It made me want to step my game up, 100%, being like, ‘He put this much thought into his character, I need to put twice as much thought into mine.’ When you step into someone else’s kind of gimmick, you don’t want to bring it down, you only want to elevate it.
I put so much effort into that and protecting the character and protecting when we did the Firefly Fun House and it was so fun. It’s very sad that we don’t work together anymore because it was so much fun and I think the WWE Universe saw how much fun we were having,”
After realising just how invested Wyatt was in his character, and how much work he put into making it succeed, Bliss explained that she also threw herself into hours of research.
Expanding further, the star detailed how she used her real life experiences to craft her on-screen character.
“I jumped fully in. The amount of cult documentaries and different scary movies and things I would watch. For me, I wanted to have my character have an identity crisis. With that, that’s why I reverted to a child’s mentality because for me, personally, when I had my eating disorders, it was a traumatic thing for me and my brain went back to a child-like defence mechanism. I kind of took part of that into my character.
I remember thinking, ‘what do I like watching as a child? I like watching The Big Comfy Couch.’ I got the concept of Lilly from the girl from the Comfy Couch, her doll Molly. I took a lot of childhood things that I loved and brought that into the character and also took part of the movie Orphan where the girl is 30 posing as a child and took that into the character as well.
There are a lot of things of my real interests and real things as a child that I actually brought into the dark Alexa character,”
The deadly-duo split up the night after WrestleMania 37 but as Wyatt disappeared from WWE television, Bliss remained and continued on with her darker character. Bliss revealed the difficulties she faced in wanting to push her character forward, while also respecting what she had built alongside Wyatt.
“When The Fiend and I got separated, it was, ‘How do I transition this character to make it different than what it was with The Fiend?’ I don’t know if that came across as well, but I really tried to make it different while also protecting what The Fiend and I had built with our dynamic.
For me, it was a lot of research and working with my acting coach, especially for the therapy, it was a lot of working with things in my past that caused me trauma and bringing that out in therapy sessions, that’s why when they bring out Lilly, I looked at Lilly like it was my pig Larry and remember thinking, I had to watch Larry pass, so when the therapist brought out Lilly, I envisioned Larry and if Larry came back to life, what would I say to him? That was a lot of research and effort and things that go into the character that people may or may not realize or understand that we put so much work into,”
After being defeated by Charlotte Flair at Extreme Rules in September 2021, Alexa Bliss vanished from WWE without an explanation. Bliss explained that her absence was simply down to needing a break from the all-consuming nature of the company.
H/t to Fightful for the transcription.