During his recent Talk is Jericho podcast, Chris Jericho talked about the finish of the Blood and Guts cage match from the May 5th 2021 edition of AEW Dynamite:
“The idea was, he hits me with the ring and he’s going to throw me off unless I surrender. We thought, how much of a piece of shit would he be if the guys did surrender and he threw me off anyway. It was a combination of a Tony Khan idea, an MJF idea, and a Jericho idea. I don’t pretend like I want to take crazy stunt bumps. I didn’t want to take a thumbtack bump in the Ambrose Asylum and I didn’t really want to take a bump from the top of the cage to the floor, but it was best for the story. The original plan was for Santana & Ortiz (to surrender), but Santana had the idea for Sammy to do it because it was more of a babyface thing for Sammy. It was a black gym mat, about six inches high from the bottom, and it was a bunch of cardboard boxes, just empty cardboard boxes. That’s what professional stuntmen fall on and we had a stuntman there. He orchestrated the bump Kenny and Sammy took at Stadium Stampede. Then there was plywood and decoration, like a flat piece of plastic, that looked like a steel grate. That was it. It went from being a ten-foot air mattress to a thing that was three feet off the ground, which made the fall about 18 feet. I watched the stunt guy take the fall and he had a ‘turtle shell’ to protect his back and a helmet. I didn’t get a helmet. He told me to take a step off, not to flip back, which was what happened when I took the powerbomb from Wardlow off the stage. There was a lot of praying and you just think, ‘this could be it.’ The other time I felt this way was when I took the bump into the thumbtacks. I tell (MJF), ‘Give me a shove’ because I needed to feel something so I could take a pushback. I step back and I thought the bump would go by fast, but I just kept looking at him as I fell. Then, I landed, and of course, it takes the breath out of you. I’ve seen a few people bagging on it being a crashpad. It was no crashpad, it was a cardboard box. I don’t give a s**t if it was a crash pad, you just go for it. It felt great, obviously, it hurt, but I could move my arms and legs and I wasn’t dead. The crowd went completely silent and I just laid there until they took me away on a stretcher and the people started clapping.
It was later on that I started hearing ‘the fall didn’t look great.’ For me, when I watched it back, I thought it looked amazing. When you watch it back, I barely missed hitting my head on the lights on the stage. I almost overshot everything. Everyone in the business knows how dangerous this can be and how terrifying it is and the margin for error is slim. You have the right to bag on it. Out of the 1.3 million who watched, if 3,000 people didn’t like it, that’s a very small percentage. Most people thought it was crazy and I got great feedback. I hope you enjoyed it because you’ll never see me do it again. I’m glad it turned out the way it did. I wouldn’t change anything.”
(quotes courtesy of Fightful.com)
