The slow, deliberate walk to the ring is one of the most recognizable parts of the Gangrel entrance. According to the man himself, it exists because the stage lift nearly took his foot off on his first night.
Speaking on Insight With Chris Van Vliet at Catch Pro Wrestling Academy in Nashville, the school he runs with Miro, Gangrel walked through how little time WWE gave him to put the act together before his August 1998 debut on Sunday Night Heat. He had been signed and told he would be sitting at home for a year when the call came in.
“He called me up on a Friday, and they send me my flight for Saturday, so this is like Friday evening at five, so I run out to Hot Topic,” Gangrel said. “What does a good vampire do? They go to Hot Topic, before it was mainstream back then.”
The wardrobe that became the character came off the rack that night.
“I go in Hot Topic and I’m like, oh, they want some kind of shirt, so that’s where the white puffy shirt came from. But I don’t want to be a pirate,” Gangrel said. He had already had his permanent fangs removed, so those came off the rack too. “I got like little gimmick fangs out of Hot Topic. They sold fangs right at the counter back then. So I said I’m just gonna make these work, figure it out. Fake it till you make it.”
The boots came from the store next door, and the rest came from a Renaissance fair.
“I go, man, what do I gotta do for boots? What’s next to Hot Topic? Journeys. So I roll into Journeys. There’s a pair of New Rocks. I go, oh, these are cool,” Gangrel said. “And then a Renaissance fair, so I found the shin guards to put over the boots.”
The blood was his own idea, borrowed from someone else’s stage show.
“I came up with the blood spray. That was a tribute to Gene Simmons’ guitar solo, when he comes up and the blood comes down. Figured I’ll spray it, be a little different,” Gangrel said, adding that it took a while to find the right tone with the goblet. “For a while I was making love to the blood, and they were like, hey, that’s a bit too much.”
Then came the entrance itself, and the part nobody planned. Gangrel said the lift he rode up through the fire was supposed to lock flush with the stage, and during the dry rehearsal he had been warned about a shim in it. On the live show, it did not seat properly.
“I go to step, and it turns out the shim in the elevator didn’t happen yet. So when I stepped, my foot slid under the flooring of the stage in the elevator. So it clamped down on my foot. The lift locked up. My foot was stuck in between,” Gangrel said. “Thank goodness I had those big thick boots.”
He was standing in the middle of the pyro at the time.
“So I’m standing there with the chalice going, fire. I’m stuck,” Gangrel said. “They were able to clip that away because I’m literally standing in the fire with my foot stuck in the elements.”
What came out of it stuck for good.
“Then I had a certain walk to the ring. I don’t know if you noticed that walk,” Gangrel said. “The walk came because my foot was crushed. I walked through the music, but technically I was limping to the music, because my foot had been crushed by the elevator, and my foot hurt for months. So that walk just stayed permanent. That walk became a permanent walk.”
The other thing he could not shake was the reaction on his own face.
“For the first three months, the entrance was so cool, the music was so cool, and the people would start getting into it more and more. They go, what are you doing, smiling? You’re supposed to be a vampire,” Gangrel said. “They finally said, all right, we give, man. You just have a menacing smile.”
Gangrel said the entire package came together in the space of a weekend.
“I’d been wrestling as a vampire for a while, but the look and the ensemble of the Gangrel character was thrown together overnight, and the blood. I hadn’t been doing blood up to that point, so this was all new,” Gangrel said.
He only heard the Jim Johnston theme that became his calling card once before he went out on it.
“It was a dry rehearsal. I could hear that. I was like, that’s cool,” Gangrel said. “Then came showtime, which is totally different. You come up, you hear that music, and it kind of gave me goosebumps, because the arena’s blacked out. You come up, you see the firelight, and you see these people. They’re probably like, what the hell are we looking at? And the same thing I’m looking at. What am I looking at? This is so cool.”
