Matt Hardy has previewed the next evolution of his character work for TNA, telling The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy that the new look the Hardys are debuting will be a hybrid of Broken Matt, Brother Nero, and Willow, with Willow showing up “very soon.”
The conversation came after Hardy and Jeff Hardy returned to TNA TV with a partial reset of their broken-character pitch, with Jeff appearing in a recent vignette sporting the colored contact lenses Broken Matt fans will recognize. Hardy described the new direction.
“Yes, it is. It is going to be a little bit of hybrid characters, I think, of both Broken Matt and Brother Nero. And there’s going to be some Willow thrown in there. A lot of people have been wanting to see Willow here and there. I think you’re going to see some Willow pretty soon, pretty soon.”
The new direction is positioned as an expansion of the broken concept, not a return to the original 2016 Impact run.
“And I think going forward, you’ll see these guys, as I described in that video, I said, you know what you have unlocked here, Righteous. When you have opened Pandora’s box and said, it’s not just the Broken Hardys, but the Broken Hardys are a gateway to what we will become. And, you know, we have pretty strong game plan about what we want to do going forward, as far as totally reinventing ourselves again and becoming a, my character is going to go to a different level as something else, is what we’re thinking, but it is going to kind of combine Broken Matt and Matt Hardy, so that even Broken Matt can speak crazy here and there, if he wants to say words funny, but he also talks normally, where it allows me to be much more of a normal version of myself as a broken figure, but the broken figure will be elevated into something bigger and better.”
“We could be like the Rock and Roll Express, and we could have just done the stuff that we did in the late 90s, early 2000s and rock and rolled with that and still done that. But it’s fun to change. And you know, we do love this, and it’s also how you keep yourself fresh and relevant. You have to put on like a new coat of paint. You can’t remain the same character forever, because that character that you have done for years and years and years, eventually it’s old, and you have to do something new, even though you’re still evergreen over, that doesn’t mean you can’t put on a new coat of paint and then get people excited in what you’re doing, which is new, and you’re regenerating yourself and your image and your whole career in many ways.”
He walked through his own history of reinvention.
“The first time I actually, well, I’ll go back to when I became Matt Hardy version one. I did so many things for my career just the way that was a new coat of paint. People saw me in a different light. They saw me as a much bigger star because of it. And then doing Big Money Matt was something that helped me out greatly. It helped me out when I was in that darker period through my career, and people wanted to boo me because they didn’t like some of the things I’ve done personally or just as a human being. Because I went through a dark period, I just used that to be my segue and gateway into allowing people to boo the shit out of me to whatever they want to do, to whatever I became next in my redemption story. And that worked real well, and then Broken Matt was something that revolutionized our careers, both of our careers, because just doing the Broken Hardys totally, it got us over to a new fan base. It was us doing something different. Us doing something fresh. It had never been done before, and it just was a perfect way to keep us relevant. And I feel like that’s what’s important, that’s what you have to do to continue to be relevant over the years.”
Hardy pointed to Christian Cage’s AEW run as a contemporary example of the character-work approach that he believes the modern industry needs more of.
“One of the great examples of it is what Christian Cage is doing in AEW. And I love the fact that he has done that thing where, you know, you were talking about people’s dead dads, and the fact that he continued that with the wearing the sweaters, with the sleeveless sweaters, and he’s still a real asshole. You know what I mean? Like, it’s so good. He’s really, he’s really so focused in and zoned in on what he’s doing. And he did not change that. And it’s a character that makes it fun.”
The Hardys are scheduled to face The Righteous in what Hardy called a “Wicked Garden” specialty match in the coming weeks on TNA TV.
“In TNA, we’re gonna have some interesting stuff here over the next couple weeks. I’m excited to see what this Wicked Garden match is all about. We’re gonna face The Righteous in their own specialty match. So it’s gonna be an intriguing situation.”
If you use quotes from this article, please credit The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy and include a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
