WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque appeared on the All-In Summit podcast to discuss various topics, including whether wrestlers having a blueprint in their minds for their characters creates friction with how he runs the company.
Triple H wrote, “It doesn’t create friction, it creates a partnership, which is what I love. That’s one of the favorite parts of my job is to sit down in a room with talent and say where do we want to go, where do we want to go with you, how do we want to get there? It’s not the conversation of, ‘Well I want to be champion.’ Okay, okay. Everybody does. What is your story and how do we tell it? And who here of these other talent can have a story that goes against your arc to combine with their arc to tell a great story, right? Once we start to riff those things.”
On why modern wrestlers have to merge their real life persona with their on-screen character:
“Today’s world is different. You go back, you know, 40-50 years, Ivan Koloff was a Canadian guy that played a Russian because we were in the middle of a cold war and it was the easy thing to do. But you couldn’t do that character now because the internet would go like he’s from Canada, right? It doesn’t work. They know the truth. So today you have to sort of blend who you are real life with the character that you play and sort of blur this line, blur this line of the fourth wall of was that real or do these guys really not like each other or is that really you know while you’re putting it together backstage we’re all agreeing on where we want to go and then we tell this story that people cannot tell what’s real and what is fantasy and that’s when it gets magical.”
On learning the blueprint for athletics from Arnold Schwarzenegger:
“One one thing for me when I was a kid and I first wandered into the gym and I learned who Arnold Schwarzenegger was, who I consider one of the great American success stories of all time. He had a blueprint in his mind as a young kid of what he saw. He saw a a bodybuilder named Reg Park and thought to himself, I follow that blueprint. I’m going to be like Reg Park. I’m going to become the biggest bodybuilder of all time. I’m going to get into Hollywood. I’m going to take over Hollywood. Then I’m going to get into politics, and I’m going to do right like he saw this blueprint. He did it. I saw that same blueprint for me, right? But what taught me to do those things was athletics. It started with the physical. The gym does not bull**** you.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
