Matt Hardy is a master of reinvention, and while under contract to IMPACT Wrestling in 2016, he created his now-iconic Broken Matt character.
Alongside his brother Jeff and wife Reby, Hardy introduced the world to cinematic matches and longform storytelling in a fantastical universe. The character was divisive, but many fans praised Hardy for his inventiveness and creativity.
When Jeff and Matt Hardy returned to WWE, however, the character was somewhat watered down, and the highly-anticipated feud between Matt and fellow supernatural wrestler Bray Wyatt fell flat in the WWE environment.
Speaking on the latest episode of his Oh You Didn’t Know podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Road Dogg admitted to not understanding the Broken Matt character, who was called Woken Matt in WWE.
“I didn’t get the Broken character. I never got it. I don’t understand it. If there’s something to understand, I would love to know what that is, but he just changed and talked differently. I don’t know. I didn’t see the transformation or follow it. I never got it. That was not me writing that.”
“What Were Their Characters?” – Road Dogg On Broken Matt Hardy And Bray Wyatt
Continuing, Road Dogg elaborated on not understanding who Hardy and Bray Wyatt were as characters during their 2017-2018 feud.
“We put him with Bray because we thought together they could really be this cool entity, but I will say, no, we didn’t know what to do with them. The part I’m going to unpack is, what were their characters? If you could describe them to me, if you could give me an elevator pitch, a summary of their characters, then maybe we could have written them in that direction or something.
“I’ll take the heat and I always will for a failed opportunity, an opportunity I missed as a writer or a creative guy on the show. I’ll always take the hit for that. We let them be their creative selves and their creative selves, and this is horrible, and I don’t mean to say it like this, but I don’t think they knew at that time what they were trying to do. I don’t think they knew, I don’t think we knew, and together, it made a who knew stew, and so it turned out as such.
“I will take some heat for that, no two ways about it. I just don’t know if anybody else who should, will.”
h/t WrestlingNews.co