Jason Baker worked closely with the late Bray Wyatt (Windham Rotunda) on his WWE character, and he remembered how Wyatt wanted to delay his WWE return at Extreme Rules 2022 when Baker’s grandmother passed away.
In a recent interview with Metro UK, Baker revealed Wyatt offering him to push the return back from Extreme Rules 2022.
Wyatt died of a heart attack while asleep at his home on August 24, 2023, at the age of 36.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On Wyatt’s offer to delay the return: “I literally just took him to the airport and dropped him off – he was gonna go home for a few days and come back and then we were gonna finalize everything for the Extreme Rules return. An hour later after I dropped him off at the airport, I got the call from my mom saying that she’d passed away. Shot him a text saying, ‘Hey man, I got the call’. Without even skipping a beat, Windham goes, ‘Do you wanna push this back? It was like, ‘What?’ He was like, ‘Yeah man. look, I know how important your grandma was to you, and I can’t do this without you. If you can’t do it, I won’t hold that against you, and we can push it back.”
On how much the offer touched him: “It’s like dude, look – I know I don’t come from the wrestling world but I know how much of a unicorn second chances are in that industry, and I can’t ask you to do that. But that’s just how he was, he was a wonderful person. Past all the work and all the amazing things he did as a wrestler, he was just an amazing human, an amazing friend.”
On being the guy under the Fiend mask at Extreme Rules: “They were like, ‘We’re gonna have The Fiend as well, on top of all the puppets.’ We were gonna pick some random, whoever, and Windham goes, ‘No, Jason, you have to play The Fiend. You’re the only person I trust with it.’ I know what that means, to have a wrestler be like, ‘I trust you enough with this gimmick that I’ve created to go portray it for 30 seconds.’ That magnitude was definitely not lost on me.”
