The “Ultimate Deletion” match between “Woken” Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt from 2018 was filmed on location at the Hardy Compound in North Carolina. In a new interview, Matt Hardy has pulled back the curtain on the creative process for the match, revealing some input from Vince McMahon, including a pitch for Bray Wyatt to emerge from the “Lake of Reincarnation” with a live fish in his mouth.
Cinematic matches became a staple of WWE programming during the pandemic, but the “Ultimate Deletion” was a precursor, building on the success of the “Final Deletion” match Hardy had produced in TNA. Vince McMahon apparently had some very specific ideas for it.
Speaking on his podcast, The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, the TNA World Tag Team Champion recounted the stressful night of filming. He revealed that he had a big table spot planned for himself, but Vince McMahon called at 2 AM and personally scrapped the idea, stating that there was “too much fucking hokey wrestling” in the match already.
“I was going to come out of that tree and do a leg drop and try and put, I was going to put Bray on the bottom table… And Vince heard we’re going to do this. ‘Oh, god no.’ He said, ‘It sounds like there’s too much fucking hokey wrestling in this already.’ He said, ‘This thing needs to be entertaining. It needs to be, I want to see something where there’s a scene that we do and where it’s Jeff’s legitimate graveyard,’ the Benny Hill scene.”
Hardy then told the story of McMahon’s even stranger pitch for the match’s finale. The former WWE Chairman wanted Bray Wyatt to be submerged in the Lake of Reincarnation, only to re-emerge like a horror movie villain with a live, wiggling fish in his mouth before sinking back under the water.
“Vince said what I would like to see is Bray go in this Lake of Reincarnation, and then he comes out at the end like Jason Voorhees, and he’s got a fucking fish in his mouth, and then he just sinks back underneath. He said, ‘Can we make that happen?’ And it’s two o’clock in the morning. I was like, ‘Bro, we’re in Cameron. We’re not going to be able to go, like, buy a fish.’… I said, if we would have planned this in advance, we probably could have bought a fish… I said, but, like, not at two o’clock in the morning. It’s pretty unrealistic.”
Hardy is currently a TNA World Tag Team Champion with his brother Jeff. The full interview is available on the latest episode of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit with an h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
