Joe Gacy says the Wyatt Sicks had a proper premise behind it that WWE never put on television, and that what reached the screen was closer to five people being asked to act unhinged.
The group debuted in June 2024, formed by Bo Dallas as Uncle Howdy in memory of his brother Bray Wyatt, with each member taking on one of the puppet characters from Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse. Gacy was Huskus the Pig Boy.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, he described the pitch as it was explained to him.
“Yeah, I think that was kind of the pitch, was like, you know, we’re continuing on the legacy. And the whole idea of the group was, and I don’t think this was ever conveyed properly through promos or anything on TV, was really the idea is that each member of the group, we are who we used to be. Like I was the same Joe Gacy from NXT at the time, but the whole idea was that Bo Dallas, now in this place he’s in, becoming Uncle Howdy, split personality. It’s almost like a cult idea where he kind of convinced us, like, hey, you know, we can have this family together.”
The puppets, in other words, were something Uncle Howdy saw rather than something the members became.
“He pushed these, for lack of a better term, characters on us, because they were from the Firefly Funhouse. So in his mind, the crazy side of Bo Dallas saw, like for instance, me, he saw me as Huskus, like I was the puppet of Huskus, just brought to life, sort of. So the idea for the group was, we were all kind of in on it. Where I know I’m Joe Gacy, but I’m also using the live puppet Huskus as far as a personality.”
“So I know it’s a little complex, I guess, to explain on TV, but I don’t even think we touched upon that, like, at all.”
He said the group was also written as a unit that would never turn on each other.
“The whole idea was, you know, it started as, we’re going to be a family, we are a chosen family together, and we were supposed to stick by each other. We never even wanted to tease any kind of animosity or anything like that. So, and I think they just wanted us to be psychopaths, essentially.”
The look, at least, was his own. Gacy said the mask came from a pitch he made to Jason Baker, who built Bray Wyatt’s masks and gear.
“My big thing was Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So basically Jason Baker, the guy who worked with Windham and did all the gear and masks, everything with him, basically asked me like, you know, what are you feeling as far as the vibe of this gimmick? And I’m just like, I mean, it’d be great if I could do anything in the style of Leatherface. So I think that’s why he made the mask the way it looked, because it was like pigskin but sewn together pretty much in that style. He was the one that had the idea to make it like a gas mask.”
“But for me, I kind of saw it as like Leatherface, maybe a little hint of old Mankind in there. I think that’s where maybe the hunched walk sort of came from.”
The trade-off was that he spent two years working blind.
“The thing with the mask I wore was I couldn’t see a thing when I’m wearing it. So if anyone sees the way I walk, I walk with kind of one eye forward. It’s literally because it’s the only way I can move forward, because it’s a gas mask. So the goggles are here, so unless I turn my head and look like this, I couldn’t see out of it.”
That included the night the group unmasked on television, one of the biggest moments of the run.
“So I never knew when everyone else was taking their masks off, so I had to make my best guess as to when to remove it. So I was hoping that we were all getting it at the same time. I was like, well, this is the unmasking, so we can’t mess this up. And I think we timed it pretty good.”
Gacy and Dexter Lumis held the WWE Tag Team Championship during the run. All five members were released on April 24, and Gacy now works as Joseph Sawyer.
