5 WWE Superstars who underwent surprising transformations on Raw (April 22 2019)
With the 2019 Superstar Shake-Up been and gone, WWE’s new post-WrestleMania 35 era officially kick-started on the April 22 episode of Raw.
Much of the show revolved around the Universal Championship, with two Triple Threat matches taking place (AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe vs. Rey Mysterio and Baron Corbin vs. Drew McIntyre vs. The Miz) to determine who would battle it out in a #1 contender match later in the night.
The winners of the matches, Styles and Corbin, went on to meet in the main event, which saw “The Phenomenal One” pick up the victory to set up a match against Seth Rollins for the Universal title at Money In The Bank on May 19.
The episode also saw Becky Lynch defeat Alicia Fox before being struck with two Woman’s Rights by her upcoming Raw Women’s Championship opponent, Lacey Evans, while Sami Zayn insulted the crowd in his latest in-ring promo about the “toxic” WWE atmosphere.
Elsewhere on the show, five WWE Superstars/teams underwent surprising transformations that nobody would have seen coming just a few days ago.
In this article, let’s run through those Superstars and take a look at the possible reasons why WWE has chosen to alter their characters.
#5 Bobby Roode became Robert Roode
Bobby Roode established himself as one of the top bad guys in NXT during his seven-month reign with the NXT Championship in 2017, yet he has only ever been used as a babyface in his 20 months as a main-roster WWE Superstar.
That looked as though it could change recently when he showed a more villainous side to his character during his tag matches alongside Chad Gable, and the transformation was completed on this week’s Raw when he demanded to be known as ‘Robert Roode’ instead of ‘Bobby Roode’ and he sported a moustache instead of his usual beard.
“The Glorious One” went on to defeat Ricochet in one of the featured matches of the night on Raw, while he cemented his status as a heel by referring to Gable as “dead weight” following the end of their run together as a tag team.