WWE star Seth Rollins recently appeared on the podcast Games With Names to discuss various topics, including how WWE Hall of Famer Randy “Macho Man” Savage inspired his Visionary character.
Rollins said, “What a guy. What a character. I stole some of my current character from him. He was a big inspiration for a lot of it…. just the over-the-top nature.”
On why he decided to incorporate Savage into the character:
“When I was when I was developing the Visionary character, it was like coming right out of COVID. And we did we did live programming during COVID. Just as NFL played games with nobody there, we did our TV shows with nobody there. But it became — I mean, from an NFL perspective, you guys had like the cardboard cutouts in the stands or whatever. And it was like — it was boring, right? It was dead. There’s no energy. That’s how it was where we did ours in the Performance Center, and then later we did some residencies in the local arenas in Florida. But one of the things that I noticed when I was watching the program. I have my baby in December and I have two months off, or maybe a month off or so. And when I’m watching the program, I just noticed how like [bleh] everything was. And it was just like everything was toned way down. All the the promos, the backstage, everything was just muted. It felt slow and it felt like everybody was trying to follow this trend. Like Roman Reigns is really hot at the time. He’s doing this Tribal Chief thing where everything’s just “Mmmm.’ Just, you know, mob bossy, very quiet and understated. And so when I was watching the show, I was like, ‘Man, I didn’t love this about wrestling. I loved like larger than life, bright colors, over the top.’”
On Savage and other heels he took inspiration from:
“And ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage, bam! You know what I mean? The way he delivered his promos, but he could still be taken serious when it was time to fight. Ric Flair, Rick ‘The Model’ Martel, Mr. Perfect, ‘Ravishing’ Rick Roode. These were the guys, the villains that I looked at and and hated but loved at the same time. So, I took some elements of those guys when I was thinking about what the Visionary could be. Randy was probably one of the biggest the biggest influences on the character, I would say.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
