Ahead of the WWE Royal Rumble pay-per-view. Bray Wyatt was interviewed on “Out of Character with Ryan Satin.”
Bray was asked how he feels about his return to WWE:
“I think there’s a part of any athlete when you’re away from something for so long. There’s something in the back of your head that’s like, ‘Am I still it? Am I what I am, what I should be?’ I think that for the majority since I’ve been back, I was kind of there in a sense, and as the weeks progressed, I’ve really started to kind of come into my own again and start to remember why I do this and how much it means to me to be out there and perform at things like the Royal Rumble. So the closer I’ve gotten, I’ve really started to sink my teeth into being what I should be.”
On opportunities he had while he was away from WWE:
“I had opportunities to do really cool things, movies and TV shows and stuff, and I just, I wouldn’t because I felt broken. It was like there was something that was just shut off and I didn’t understand why. It was literally people telling me, and just keeping me alive and dragging me back, telling me, ‘You should still do this. We miss you.’ I didn’t feel that way at first. I felt damaged, and that kind of gave me the strength to kind of build back out and explode. So it was geared for them.”
On what was going on in his personal life:
“There was so much going on and it came out of nowhere. I wasn’t prepared for any of that. I lost Brodie. I lost my best friend from college, Mark. It was something that I didn’t deal with very well. Brodie’s wife, Amanda, dealt with it. The kids dealt with it better than me. There’s something there that reminds me of him every single day. I think that time period was such a conundrum for me. I wasn’t myself and it took me a while to remember what makes me, me. It was a long journey, man, but it’s led me here into this moment, and this is the best I’ve ever felt.”
Bray was asked what we should expect in a Pitch Black match:
“I think that’s kind of the beauty of it. Usually in these kinds of situations, there’s all this crazy mysticism surrounding it and it all seems to be kind of derived from my mind, but this one is not like that. It’s kind of cool, you know, being thrust in a position where I genuinely don’t know what the Pitch Black match is going to be like. I’ve been assured that it’s unlike anything that’s ever been seen before and I can’t imagine that. I love to innovate. I love to take risks and do things that everyone else wouldn’t dare to do because I’m half an idiot and half a genius, I guess. But I have no idea and I think that’s exciting for me. It’s cooler that way. I’d rather just walk into the unknown. It’s what I’m best at, I think.”
On the Uncle Howdy character:
“There’s things about me that people don’t understand. When they see all these chapters in myself, they kind of look at them as ‘Oh, like split personalities or something like that.’ If you ever met anyone with personalities, you would see that it’s not so cut and dry. It’s not so simple. It’s not like a movie. I suffer from a diagnosis that I’m not going to share with people, and I like being the voice for people to see on a real basis instead of a cartoonish version. But Uncle Howdy and Bray and all these things, these are all real. They’re based on moments and things that have really happened. The Uncle Howdy, there’s so much more to it than you think. It’s not just so cut and dry, the spooky man in the background. There’s more to it. There’s complexities that you haven’t got to see yet. There’s things that I don’t understand about it, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s going to grow organically, but the story of it, I don’t even think has been told yet. Once you understand what it really is and where it came from, in my childhood, and who Howdy really is, it’s much deeper than you think it is, then you would perceive it to be.”
Bray was asked what The Undertaker whispered to him in his ear at RAW XXX:
“I think everybody kind of can see it for what it was, right? When something like that happens, that’s something that no one can take away from me. That moment belongs to me. No one else in the world, in the history of time, ever gets to have that moment. No one but me. What he said was something that only I would have understood and something that only I would be able to appreciate for when and where it happened. It was something I never thought would come, but what he said exactly is between me, him, God, and the devil. I’ll never, never tell a soul. I’ll go to my grave with it. But it was powerful and it was unexpected. Very, very cool. Something that I will cherish the rest of my life.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Out of Character with Ryan Satin with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
