Michael Cole spent years calling Bray Wyatt’s work, and he says one idea the two of them built together never made it to air.
Speaking on The Sal Licata Show this week, seven years to the day after The Fiend debuted on Raw, Cole looked back on working with Wyatt going all the way back to the start.
“Bray and I did a lot of work together over the years. Bray was awesome. I remember him as Husky Harris back in his NXT days. He was one of the most creative people that we’ve ever had in our company,” Cole said. “Unbelievably nice man as well. But he had so many ideas for obviously the Bray Wyatt character with the lantern and such, and also for The Fiend.”
Cole said the character worked because Wyatt could always deliver on the concept.
“The Fiend was such a phenomenon. It was just so much fun to watch,” Cole said. “It was always, how are you going to translate this to the ring? And he was able to do that.”
The one that got away was a sit-down interview series modeled on the prison interviews cult leader Charles Manson gave over the years.
“Bray and I had worked for a number of years on trying to do a sit-down interview where it would be like Michael Cole interviewing Charles Manson in prison. And if you’ve ever gone back and watched some of the old videotapes of interviews that had been done with Manson in prison, it was a really intriguing idea by Bray,” Cole said. “We had even mapped it out, and the concept was ready to go. And for some reason, it never happened.”
Cole believes it would have added a layer the character never got to show.
“I thought that would have really, especially if it was a multi-part interview series, I think that would have really helped Bray bring out that character even more. And we could see that real sick, sadistic side of that Bray Wyatt character,” Cole said. “But everything he touched was gold, guys.”
He closed on what the company lost.
“And just an incredible guy, a guy that is missed every single day by everybody in our company,” Cole said. “And man, I still wish he was here.”
Wyatt, whose real name was Windham Rotunda, debuted The Fiend on the July 15, 2019 episode of Raw with an attack on Finn Balor, and the character had its in-ring debut against Balor at SummerSlam that August. He died in August 2023 at the age of 36.
