In a recent episode of his podcast, “The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy,” pro wrestling legend and former TNA World Tag Team Champion Matt Hardy discussed a variety of topics.
One key topic was how Jeff Hardy’s leg injury indirectly led to the creation of the Broken Universe, including the development of the Broken Matt Hardy character.
Matt Hardy said, “If Jeff doesn’t break his leg, and we just continue wrestling against the Young Bucks, we just continue to be tag champs and do that. But I feel like we had talked even before that we needed to reinvent ourselves to a degree. Once he was gone, my will is returning. (It) was already starting — it was like, ‘All right, let me do something here while I can reinvent.’ If we hadn’t gone in the direction of Broken Matt Hardy, we may have ended up doing something totally different that may or may not have been a success. Who knows? We would have probably done something, though.”
On the Lake of Reincarnation:
“It’s kind of crazy, we accidentally got into that. We were saying, ‘How about if I choke Jeff out, and then out of the lake, he pops up as Willow?’ So many people said, ‘Oh my god, when he went in the lake, he changed characters!’ And we were like, ‘Hey, maybe we can make that the Lake of Reincarnation.’ That wasn’t our initial thought when we first did it, but then so many people perceived it that way, and we were like, ‘Wow, that actually works.’ That’s how the whole Lake of Reincarnation became that whole bit. One of my favorite scenes in there, which is just campy as s**t but I love it so much, is what we called the Scooby-Doo spot. We had this planned when we were sketching out an outline of the match — it’s the spot where we get Willow out, he’s been tased by Señor Benjamin. And I go down and pull the mask off Willow, and it’s Señor Benjamin, the guy who tased him. It’s that whole thing where you pull the mask off and it’s not the person you expect.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
