During his appearance on “E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness”, Tommaso Ciampa, Edge and Christian discussed why so few heels today are successful. Ciampa believes that it is because not enough heels are committed to kayfabe and that they would be successful at raising the ire of the fan base if they were. Here are the highlights:
On NXT Lacking Heels:
You guys would talk about this a lot, especially Christian, you’d say, ‘NXT is missing a heel.’ I felt that way the entire time I was away. I was going to do my darndest to fill that void because I play a different heel than most people play and I knew that if I committed to this that people would lose their minds. There’s always these different trends in wrestling, but nobody was committing to kayfabe.
Christian seemed to agree with Ciampa’s take and added that he believes too many wrestlers need praise from the fans in order to feel appreciated:
[A lot of people suffer because] they realize they’re not getting adulation. Some people need a little of that. You can’t have redeeming qualities. Sometimes you’ll see someone play heel and then go on social media and go, ‘Green Bay, you were such a great crowd tonight.’ … You were living that. It wasn’t just a character.
Ciampa On How He Played Up To Perception:
The running joke in our apartment complex was that Johnny was the married one and I was living with them. Like it was ‘Three’s Company.’ It was so weird! It was the perception and I was like, ‘Why should I change that? People are digging it.’ I knew I was married, but it didn’t benefit us to change the perception. We left it alone. I never said I wasn’t married but I didn’t offer up information.
When the heel flip happened, everything just snowballed. Why put out merch? If they put out merch then they’re gonna buy it and dig it. Even with catchphrases, when I did promos I was always very aware that my cadence couldn’t be catchy. Once it got going, we have Shawn [Michaels] at the Performance Center and then Hunter was behind it big time, everyone was on-board and affirming that this was working then it was like, ‘What’s the next thing I can do?’
You can listen to the podcast below:
Credit: E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness. H/T Wrestlezone.
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