During a recent appearance on the Two-Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast, Kevin Kelly commented on coming up with the Triple H and Stephanie McMahon on-screen relationship, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On writing the Triple H and Stephanie McMahon relationship storyline: “I’m responsible for the relationship between Triple H and Stephanie. That’s what I’m responsible for, because I came up with the idea along with my wife. My wife is partly responsible. We’re both big soap opera fans and so the idea of Triple H bamboozling Test [Andrew Martin] and marrying Stephanie to screw over Test and also to piss off his future father-in-law is soap opera 101 and again, the similarities between the two with their hair down would be easy to do so I wrote this whole big thing up and sent it in. Vince [McMahon] copied everybody like I’m supposed to and Vince was the first one to write back all in caps, ‘That’s great sh*t.’ It’s like wow and then Shane McMahon came down the hall and poked his head in my door and said, ‘Dude, that idea is crazy. I love it’ and then end up changing it how they needed to and that’s what it was so it was pretty cool to see. It’s cool when you see an idea that you have come to life. I of course wrote the end where Stephanie winds up leaving Triple H but also leaving her father and becoming this strong, standalone woman. They wound up falling in love and have children and have been married ever since so, they didn’t follow the script as it were. They wrote their own ending, a happy ending I’m sure.”
On the angle of Steve Austin invading Brian Pillman’s home: “It was nerve racking. It was very — it was unsettling because you had Brian Pillman in his house who had legitimately just undergone major surgery on his ankle for the second time and he was a — he just had a weird look in his eye the whole day. It was just very odd and it was kind of call it as we go along. There wasn’t a lot of prep or preparation. I did my one standup that was outside which was pre-recorded only slightly before RAW went on the air and the rest of it was live, live pal. So, man, and when we got done, it was such a rush, such a relief. My gosh, we did this. We just did satellite broadcasting live from Brian Pillman’s house and holy crap, I’m sure the world is going crazy about that. We weren’t on smart phones back then. We didn’t have Twitter so we couldn’t see like instant audience reaction but when we got back to Stamford, apparently there were a lot of people — but everybody was talking about it. There was some television executives at USA [Network] that weren’t happy. By the way, brandishing a gun on live television, not good, and internationally it was a nightmare because our television partners had different laws, different rules and internationally, everything had to be so covered up that they couldn’t really air any of it. It was hard for them to put together the international version of RAW. But again, it’s one of those things that I realized how monumental it was because here we are, so many years removed and people are still talking to me about it. It’s like wow, what a moment in time that you don’t realize at the time will be. You’re just kind of hopeful to get through it all and not screw up and yet so many years later, people remember it like one of their earliest memories from their fandom was like, ‘Oh my God, when Brian Pillman had the gun and Steve Austin was breaking into his house and you’re screaming’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, it was real.’ Real gun, real everything. Real emotion, real reaction. You get that type of atmosphere, you’re going to get memorable television every time.”
