Matt Hardy On Portraying Different Personas, Gaining Confidence In Promos
Photo Credit: YouTube/MATTHARDYBRAND
Matt Hardy recently spoke with Darren Paltrowitz of Sportskeeda and discussed several topics, including his work with All Elite Wrestling and his ability to portray various personas. Here are some highlights:
On working with All Elite Wrestling:
Hardy: “I’ve been thrilled with my experience in AEW, and I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. You know, I wanted to pick up where we should have left off with Broken Matt Hardy, and I did a little story and that segued into that, which is Free The Delete, which is available at my YouTube channel, if you’ve never seen it. And that kinda talked about how there was a new version of Matt Hardy coming to AEW, and then once I started, from the jump, my plan was to do different versions of my personas throughout time as the multifarious Matt Hardy. And then, ultimately, my goal is to lead that into one thing, something new, kind of like put that all together into one new entity and kind of have that be the next persona I really want to get over and run with.”
On whether he has taken acting classes:
Hardy: “No, we’re pro wrestlers, and pro wrestlers aren’t the greatest actors because we’re athletes and whenever we perform and we entertain, we’re kind of over the top, that is what we are taught to do from day one. Especially in the ring, when you are playing to the person in the furthest row in the building, you know, so I feel like I’ve gotten better. I certainly have, during promos, when I first started doing promos. I was a very southern kid with a really strong southern accent, and just gaining confidence and becoming more educated, traveling the world and really just studying my craft and learning what works in the context of a certain story, just depending on what your character is, if it’s serious or if it’s like fantastical, I have a different promo for every different persona.”
On being able to switch personas:
Hardy: “I will be honest, one of the things that was the trickiest to me now that I’ve started doing the first version again which is basically V1, the sensei of Mattitude, he always speaks with a certain cadence, he always speaks like this, like ‘As a matter of fact, Matt strongly dislikes mustard,’ and I noticed there were times whenever I was doing that in certain bits, and it was like I could feel Broken Matt Hardy speak trying to come through, so that’s one of the things you really have to stay focused on. You know, if I’m doing like Unkillable Matt, it’s just me, it’s basically me, if I’m doing old-school Matt, it’s me like as an indy guy trying to use old terms or you know, my Surge terminology, you’re trying to be a little more old-school in certain ways. The first version speaks like that with the cadence I was talking about, Broken Matt Hardy is obviously Broken Matt Hardy and Big Money Matt is kind of a wealthy jerk, so that’s my different motivations for my personas.
The full video is available here:
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