Matt Hardy Remembers WWE Pitch For Faction With Himself, Jeff Hardy and Bray Wyatt

In the latest episode of The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy (via Fightful), Matt Hardy recalled a pitch for a faction in WWE that included himself, his brother Jeff and Bray Wyatt. Hardy feuded with Randy Orton in February 2020, shortly before leaving WWE and going to AEW. He said the feud was part of the pitch, with the intent to keep him in WWE.

He said: ““That was, I wanna say it was Vince’s idea and it came to me via Michael Hayes and Bruce Prichard. I think they talked about it, and there was an idea about re-signing and doing a program with Randy for a few weeks, five-six weeks on TV, maybe having him hurt me and then come back out and fight him and do a couple other matches, this, that, and the other thing. There was a tag in there somewhere I think, they had an idea about. Then the selling point too, they offered me, there was this pitch,” Matt Hardy said. “They said, ‘Well, if you do come back, now that we’ve got Windham doing this, he has the Firefly Fun House, where he’s a very comical character and very unserious, and then he turns into The Fiend, he’s like this killing machine. What if we did something where we put you with him, and you could be Broken Matt Hardy, which was this fun, happy-go-lucky type guy, and you could do that, but then you have this real mean streak character?’ Then with Jeff, we could have him do Willow the Wisp and some other mean-streak characters as well. You could be a little faction.’ That was very appealing, I’m not gonna lie about it. But it was just one of those things, they said, ‘We’re only gonna do that direction if you choose to re-sign,’ and then it kinda got to the point where it was like, ‘Ah, they’re kind of using this as a hook, and I see how Vince sees me already, I know what’s happening. So I’m gonna try something else.’ That’s why I ended up trying AEW.“