The Undertaker spoke about his original idea of the AJ Styles feud and finding out about his brother Tim’s passing during filming of the Boneyard Match, on the final episode of Last Ride docuseries. Here are the highlights:
Original idea for the AJ Styles feud: From the time I agreed to do [the WrestleMania match with Styles], I envisioned us have a wrestling match in a wrestling ring in front of 80,000 people. COVID-19 is just so bizarre. Just crazy times and I mean our audience is such a vital factor to our product. You just feed off their energy and now you’re handcuffed in a lot of ways to what you can do and what you can’t do. We played the cards that we were dealt and it was one of those times where we turned chicken s–t into chicken salad.
Filming the match offsite: We got extremely lucky in the sense that we were able to go offsite and do this match offsite because of where the story developed and the severity of how personal it became when he crossed all the lines that he crossed in his promos, I don’t think that you can have a wrestling match, which we always envisioned.” The Undertaker added, “it turned out to be probably the best thing that we could have done.
Finding out about his brother Tim’s passing: We were on our way back [to WWE PC] and I was in the car with Triple H [and] Michael Hayes. My phone started to ring, and I looked down, and it was my niece. And then, something just told me in my head, ‘you need to answer that call.’” The Undertaker recalled, “and in the middle of all this stuff that was going on with WrestleMania, when everything goes perfect, it’s hectic and stressful, but now I have to call all my brothers and let them know and then call my mother knowing what that was going to do to her and not be able to be there. It’s just another indication of how important being present with your family is because you just never know what’s going to happen, so it was an extremely rough day.
Difficulties shooting the Boneyard Match and cutting his arm: It was a difficult night and it was every bit as rough as it looked,” The Undertaker revealed. “Five minutes into shooting, I put my arm through the hearse side window. It chews up my arm, so we had to stop shooting immediately, so they had to clean my arm out, dig the pieces of glass out of my arm. And what happens when you film that way is you get started and then there’s a stoppage. They’ve got to switch cameras around, try to switch lighting around, and for me, where I’m at physically, just standing in one place is the worst. It allows that adrenaline to come down a little bit and then it allows whatever it is that’s hurting, like, ‘okay, that’s going to be bad tomorrow.’ It was just a really long night and we wrapped at about 5 a.m.
