WWE News: The Undertaker reveals how he originally wanted to play his character
What's the story?
The Undertaker spoke with Pastor Ed Young about a wide range of topics. One of the interesting topics he covered involved getting to people think that the Undertaker was 'actually dead' upon inception of the gimmick. 411mania.com carried transcripts of the interview.
In case you didn't know...
The Undertaker has been the most loyal WWE employee for the last 30 years. He is responsible for making his character the best gimmick of all time.
His streak became synonymous with WrestleMania, but it appears that he is starting to branch out into other wrestling ventures not related to WWE, like Starrcast II in May.
The heart of the matter
The Deadman might not be wrestling at this year's WrestleMania, but talking with him outside of the ring is almost as satisfying nowadays as a match with the Phenom in April, given how rarely he talks out of character.
He spoke with Pastor Ed Young about how when the character of the Undertaker originally started out, he wanted to make people think that the character was actually dead.
“I have lived this for the last 28 years,” he said. “And my goal when I started doing this was like to have people actually wonder, is he really dead? You know? When you have that mindset — a lot of people believed it for a long time."
The jig was up, however, as the internet ruined the sense of wonder he had originally built up for the character.
"The internet came along and they ruined all that, but uh, so, yeah, it’s pretty interesting to have people, everything was fear driven at first, I just wanted to scare everyone, and I did a pretty good job of it just by not really saying much. Just giving them the look. It was so different for the time period.”
Even though most fans knew that he wasn't, in fact, dead, he still used trademarks of the character like rising from a lying position during matches, rolling his eyes into the back of his head and raising his hands to get the lights to come back on.
What's next?
A lot of today's Superstars could learn and extremely large amount about the business from the Deadman, especially about how to get a strange character to work.
More of today's gimmicks are simply personalities rather than characters but as long as the Superstar is really into getting it to work, then the fans will likely buy into it more.
It's true that it is hard to get a gimmick like that of a dead man to work with today's society, but the best at their craft can get anything to work. Hopefully, he can still appear as a character with the WWE.