Matt Hardy says there was a pitch for a stable that would have included him, Bray Wyatt, and Jeff Hardy.
In February 2020, Matt Hardy feuded with Randy Orton as part of Orton's rivalry with Edge. Orton took Hardy out with multiple vicious attacks, which marked WWE writing Hardy off of television ahead of his departure from the company. Hardy then signed with AEW and made his debut for the company on March 18.
Speaking on The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, the AEW star was asked about how the idea for his feud with Randy Orton came up.
“That was, I wanna say it was Vince’s idea and it came to me via Michael Hayes and Bruce Prichard," Matt Hardy said. "I think they talked about it, and there was an idea about re-signing and doing a program with Randy for a few weeks, five-six weeks on TV, maybe having him hurt me and then come back out and fight him and do a couple other matches, this, that, and the other thing. There was a tag in there somewhere I think, they had an idea about," Hardy said.
Matt Hardy went on to describe how there was a pitch for a stable with Bray Wyatt and Jeff Hardy. He noted that, at the time, Wyatt had both The Fiend persona and that of his Firefly Fun House counterpart, and "Broken" Matt Hardy could have fit in with that. However, Matt stated that he felt like it was being used as a "hook", so he ultimately decided to leave.
"Then the selling point too, they offered me, there was this pitch," Matt Hardy said. "They said, ‘Well, if you do come back, now that we’ve got Windham doing this, he has the Firefly Fun House, where he’s a very comical character and very unserious, and then he turns into The Fiend, he’s like this killing machine. What if we did something where we put you with him, and you could be Broken Matt Hardy, which was this fun, happy-go-lucky type guy, and you could do that, but then you have this real mean streak character?’ Then with Jeff, we could have him do Willow the Wisp and some other mean-streak characters as well. You could be a little faction.' That was very appealing, I’m not gonna lie about it. But it was just one of those things, they said, ‘We’re only gonna do that direction if you choose to re-sign,’ and then it kinda got to the point where it was like, ‘Ah, they’re kind of using this as a hook, and I see how Vince sees me already, I know what’s happening. So I’m gonna try something else.’ That’s why I ended up trying AEW," Hardy said.
During the podcast. Matt Hardy explained why he believed that Randy Orton is a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Check out his comments here.
Ethan Page recently reflected on working with Matt Hardy. Check out his comments here.
Click here to see what Matt Hardy had to say about The Hardys' status in AEW.
If you use these quotes, please credit the original source and link back to Fightful with an h/t for the transcription.
