During a recent appearance on the “Rasslin’ with Brandon Walker” podcast, FTR commented on turning babyface in AEW, the psychology behind fans wanting to cheer them, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
Wheeler on their babyface turn in AEW: “I think more than anything the reason people are starting to resonate with this is because that we’re opening up and allowing them to. I think for so long, we did our job as bad guys – not that we made people hate us, but we made people love the babyfaces we worked with. We knew that as bad guys, we had to take some of our cool shit out. So now that we’re good guys and they brought themselves into FTR, they’re allowed to say ‘Holy shit, these guys are awesome.’ It was a conscious effort starting with the Mox and Punk match. We had talked about it and we had an idea of where we wanted to go. We wanted to invite the fans in. So throughout the matches that we had – the match with Mox and Punk, the one I had with Punk, and the two tag matches we spoke of – we wanted the stories of those matches to be our gradual turn.”
Harwood on the psychology behind fans wanting to cheer them: “If you watch that match with Punk – this is me putting myself over – but there’s a beautiful moment in that match after it’s over. I’m sitting in the corner and I’m just looking up at Punk like, ‘You beat me.’ That was the emotion I wanted to get out of the people because I knew if they saw that one moment, they would say, ‘I’ve been there before. I gave it everything I had and I still didn’t win, but damn it, I gave it everything and I can resonate with that.’”
Wheeler: “And we started trying to clean it up a little bit too. We got rid of Tully [Blanchard] and that left out the interference. We stopped doing as many underhanded tactics – I didn’t interfere at all in the Punk match. There’s just little things we started doing to get away from the full-fledged asshole FTR that we were to still grumpy, still cocky, but still FTR. We’re still who we are, and that’s why people started gravitating towards it anyway. But we consciously made an effort to stop trying to shut them out and let them cheer us if they want to.”
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(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
