Matt Hardy sparked excitement among fans when he returned to TNA for the Rebellion pay-per-view. He has since stated that he is not signed to a contract and is still in negotiations with AEW. On the “Extreme Life of Matt Hardy” podcast, Matt discussed his free agent status.
On returning to TNA:
“So it started with getting a text on Tuesday from Tommy Dreamer. He just said, ‘Hey, TNA has been asking me about you, you know, if you’re free now. They’d be interested. I’ve got some dates I can run by you. It would be great to work with you again.’ I ended up speaking to him. He shot me some of the dates and it was wild that the dates they all shot fell on the weekends that I wasn’t already booked to do signings or a Con or whatever it may be. So I said, ‘Okay, well, I think this could be cool.’ We worked out some stuff on Wednesday and Thursday, creatively. I talked to some of the creative people. We got everything up and running. They got me a flight. They got everything set up. There’s gonna be a big secret kayfabe by coming at the end of the show as I did, and it materialized very quickly over just a couple of days.”
Matt Hardy said he has not signed a contract with TNA:
“I’m just doing a per shot, per appearance deal right now. We’re just kind of playing it by ear just to see how long this lasts. This is while I’m still speaking to entities at AEW, still speaking to other entities and other places. I feel like even doing that, and this is one of the reasons I say this because towards the end of AEW, myself and Jeff felt like we had cooled off so much. I wanted to put in that Matt fact of like, ‘Matt is in no rush to sign a contract’ because I think I can do TNA television for a few weeks back to back, be in a good angle, be in a good story, and I think it will help heat me back up a little bit. I think that’s important, especially when you’ve been cooled down a lot. I think it’s important to heat yourself back up and get some buzz on you and get some buzz surrounding you as far as the business goes. Then once again, I think there are some other places I could pop up and make appearances or whatever.”
“So, as far as the contract thing goes, you know, when you sign a contract, then you are locked in, you know, so you have to be there. That takes away a little bit of your freedom of creativity and whatnot and it kind of tightens the knot of you being able to just pop up and show up wherever you want to. TNA, they were great. They were open to everything. They really rolled out the red carpet for me, first class, which was amazing. It was great to be back there. It was a great locker room. It was great to see the people I hadn’t seen in a while. I was very happy with the weekend. It was really fun and it felt like a very productive weekend, and it should lead to a couple more very fun weeks of TV coming up.”
On his plans for the Broken Matt Hardy character:
“I’m also going to push the character forward. I’m getting ready to start shooting some vignettes where maybe you see something, and I’m gonna lean on Reby a little bit on this too. I think there’s also going to be a utilization of some more of my family in it too, like, that’s not out of the question as far as it is going forward. Even Reby said she’s ready to wrestle a match, and there might be something there with Eddie Edwards and his wife. We’ll see.”
“The whole thing with Broken Matt, I think I’m gonna push it forward where I am Matt Hardy, you know, this is me, Matt Hardy, the living legend. The guy who’s done it all, The Hardy Boys, one of the greatest tag team members of all time, whatever. He is aware that he is Broken Matt, almost like a Bruce Banner, Incredible Hulk thing. I’m going to push the character forward where we’re gonna get into that and that makes it a little more clear.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
