AJ Styles Recalls Pitch For Boneyard Match Against Undertaker, When He Found Out

AJ Styles battled the Undertaker in the cinematic Boneyard Match at WrestleMania 36, and he recently recalled the pitch for it. The two faced off in the cinematic-style match at the 2020 PLE, which was otherwise held at the WWE Performance Center due to COVID-19. The match was the main event of night one, with Undertaker winning in his final match.

Styles talked about the match and when they found out about the cinematic pitch in his appearance on Insight With Chris Van Vliet. You can see highlights below:

On the Original Idea For His Match With Undertaker:

“It’s hard to know. I do remember asking Taker, I was like, ‘Hey, can you still do the flip over to your feet onto the outside?’ He goes, ‘AJ…’ I go, oh man, I’m just making sure. I get it now that you don’t think I can do it kind of thing. But I don’t know, we didn’t get a chance to really talk it over, because by the time it was on its way, when it was happening, the world was shutting down completely, so we didn’t know what kind of match we didn’t talk about it. I was trying to think of spots in my head that we could do, but man, with everything that’s going on, it’s hard to think of anything else.”

On the Cinematic Pitch:

“Yeah, about two days before we had it. I think it was a week, matter of fact, because I think it was presented as a Boneyard match. I was like, ‘What the frick is a Boneyard match?’ Could have said graveyard match, but they wanted to say Boneyard match, and then I had no idea where it was going, and then we go over to the place where the cinematic match is going to happen. It looked like nothing. It was basically nothing. Then I get brought back the day of the shoot. I was like, oh my gosh, this looks amazing. This looks unbelievably amazing. This is awesome. And so I started getting excited about that, because you think about cinematic matches normally don’t do well, they’re not the best thing ever.”