Matt Hardy Says Broken Universe Might Not Have Happened If Not For Jeff’s Broken Leg

On the latest episode of Extreme Life Of Matt Hardy, the TNA star reflected on how Jeff Hardy’s leg injury indirectly opened the door for the Broken Matt character to take over including the Lake of Reincarnation and more. Jeff broke his leg during a motocross accident in 2015, which forced the two to relinquish the TNA World Tag Team Championships. You can check out some highlights below:

On the ‘What If’:

“If Jeff doesn’t break his leg, and we just continue wrestling against the Young Bucks, we just continue to be tag champs and do that. But I feel like we had talked even before that we needed to reinvent ourselves to a degree. Once he was gone, my will is returning. (It) was already starting — it was like, ‘All right, let me do something here while I can reinvent.’ If we hadn’t gone in the direction of Broken Matt Hardy, we may have ended up doing something totally different that may or may not have been a success. Who knows? We would have probably done something, though.”

On the Lake of Reincarnation incident:

“It’s kind of crazy, we accidentally got into that. We were saying, ‘How about if I choke Jeff out, and then out of the lake, he pops up as Willow?’ So many people said, ‘Oh my god, when he went in the lake, he changed characters!’ And we were like, ‘Hey, maybe we can make that the Lake of Reincarnation.’ That wasn’t our initial thought when we first did it, but then so many people perceived it that way, and we were like, ‘Wow, that actually works.’

“That’s how the whole Lake of Reincarnation became that whole bit. One of my favorite scenes in there, which is just campy as s**t but I love it so much, is what we called the Scooby-Doo spot. We had this planned when we were sketching out an outline of the match — it’s the spot where we get Willow out, he’s been tased by Señor Benjamin. And I go down and pull the mask off Willow, and it’s Señor Benjamin, the guy who tased him. It’s that whole thing where you pull the mask off and it’s not the person you expect.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Extreme Life Of Matt Hardy with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.