Rotunda was not pleased with the angle, per Kyle Scarborough.
A deep dive into Windham Rotunda a.k.a. Bray Wyatt’s Fiend character was done by artist Kyle Scarborough, as he was being interviewed by SOUNDSPHERE MAGAZINE.
Kyle collaborated with Windham on the initial sketches for what would become The Fiend. He remembers Rotunda making a tongue-in-cheek comment before pitching the idea for the new character. He recalled Rotunda saying that WWE was not in a position to say no to new ideas with the launch of AEW happening.
The sense Kyle got from Windham was that the early stages of the Firefly Fun House was not a company-backed project and people got on board once they saw the success of it. He shared that Rotunda vented to him about not being pleased with the 2019 angle that saw Seth Rollins show up to the Fun House and setting it on fire.
According to Scarborough, Windham often felt he needed to get online and spin the narrative. He went on to discuss other out of the box ideas he had and design concepts for The Fiend.
The way I always understood it, by the way he (Windham Rotunda) spoke of it, was that the initial Fiend stuff and the Fun House and all that, I don’t know if anyone’s kind of revising history a bit but to hear him say it to me was, this was early days, AEW had just started and I remember he had kind of (a) tongue-in-cheek comment. He goes, you know, ‘They’re not really in the position to say no to ideas right now…’ At that time, talent was either leaving or talent was leveraging, whatnot and what have you. This is how businesses go which I think is beneficial to the wrestling business to have those options because it forces people to be creative and utilize talent. So, he felt, I think, he had the opportunity to get the idea heard, if only because what else are they gonna do? And he almost seemed to… I really feel like the early days of the Fun House stuff and the buildup was really him doing it. I don’t think, and someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t get the sense by the way he spoke of it that it was a company-backed thing. It was almost like, he’s gonna go out of his way, he’s gonna reach out to people and that’s where I became one of the lucky ones, to say, ‘Hey, I have this idea. Let’s try to bring it to life’ and then you have these people bring it to life… They did the Fun House, they tried it out. When it became a success and started to really pick up, then the battles became the writers… we spent a lot of those conversations where he would vent about the frustrations of that process. Being handcuffed a bit, being told, ‘Let’s do –’ he was not a fan of when Seth Rollins showed up in the Fun House in that one skit all those years ago. As he said, he would have to try to then get back online and spin it, spin their narrative back to what he could control… He’s got this idea. Instead of bothering to understand his idea, they wanted to kind of change it up and I think even that documentary spoke to it or someone said that where, he had some ideas but it was hard. It was hard to kind of wrangle in — maybe it was Triple H that said it but, ‘It was hard at times to take all of his ideas and kind of get him to scale it back a little bit’ and earlier when you (interviewer) said, you know, ‘Really run with it’ when it comes to designs, he’d come at me and say, ‘Well, I got one version of The Fiend and I want it to have one hand, has got this giant, long, crazy spike fingers and maybe something comes off the back of the wrists and spikes come out of that. Almost like Scarecrow’s Gauntlet and Arkham, you know?’ And you’re like, ‘What in God — you’re gonna wrestle in this?’ And I said, ‘How?’ And he said, ‘Don’t even worry about it. That’s not for us to worry about. That’s for them to worry about.’ I go, ‘How big do you want these? You want it to be like that? You’re gonna come to the ring with massive spikes on your hands?’ He goes, ‘Just go with it. Make it as big and as nasty and as gnarly’ and you know, ‘Don’t try to design something for wrestling. Don’t worry about trying to make it work. You just design.’ So he liked just pushing whatever envelope he could and trying different things out and sometimes that would work out, sometimes it backfired but, yeah. Yeah. That’s the wild storm of his thought process.
To read more from Scarborough, head over to this link. He spoke about Windham not being on board with the idea of Firefly Fun House characters coming to life and the Peacock documentary about Rotunda’s life and career.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit SOUNDSPHERE MAGAZINE with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
