The Undertaker appeared on Steve Austin’s podcast Broken Skull Sessions which aired on the WWE Network after Survivor Series and here are some highlights:
Relationship with Vince McMahon:
“We had a really good creative collaboration and it just through the years our friendship grew, but he obviously trusted my judgment with a lot of the things with the character. It was originally his vision, but he gave me a lot of creative liberty with it and he trusted me when I felt like I needed to turn into the American Bad Ass. He obviously must have felt it too. I mean we’ve butted heads and things have been rough but at the end of the day we both… Our passion is the same. We want to put out the best product possible. I never thought of myself as the locker room leader. It just kind of happened in a sense. It’s just because I was there for everything. And I tell people that sometimes, and I never mean for it to come off like I’m being an ass. But times were so hard, so lean, when business was so bad. I’ve made more and one pay off than I did in a whole year. It’s just another little thing that I put in the back of my head because I know this is where I need to be.”
“Regardless of if we butt heads or we don’t agree, which is gonna happen, it’s a creative business. We’re not gonna always see eye to eye. You and I may not have the same vision on a finish but we’ll get there. You know, that’s just the process and it’s the same with him. But we know where we got to be. I mean, I always knew that. Regardless, he gave me my chance. [There’s] no telling where I would have been if he hadn’t Give me the chance. And I just never forgot that.”
If losing to Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania 30 should’ve been the end of his career:
“I guess that’s the million dollar question. I guess it could have been [the right time to retire]. The thing about this match that nobody knows is somewhere within the first five minutes of this match I get concussed. I don’t even remember this night.”
“I mean I’ve watched it back now. I obviously know. The last memory that I can definitively tell you happened at about 3:30 in the afternoon when my wife came backstage and we had a conversation. That’s the last thing that I remember on my own of that day.”
“At this point in my career there is a huge process of me getting ready. Between the stretching, visiting the doctors, doing everything that I have to do to get myself ready to go out and perform — it’s gone. When we’re talking about process we’re talking about an hour and a half, two hour process that’s just completely gone.”
“My memory picks up I wanna say 4:30 – 5:00 in the morning when I’m in the hospital and they’re coming to check on me every five minutes to ask for my name and I’ve got no clue.”
“I walked back, I went through Gorilla and I sat down and the next thing I remember is I’m in the hospital and there’s doctors and nurses coming in every five minutes: ‘What’s your name? What’s your birthday? Where are you? I got no clue. The only thing I remember is my wife’s first name.”
Who Undertaker went to for advice:
“There was one guy… Jake [Roberts]. Not so much my delivery or what I said, but he had such insight into character. Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts, man — brilliant mind. Unbelievable insight on how to put that character together and he would tell me like he would listen to Pink Floyd or he would listen to Black Sabbath which, you know that got me, ‘Okay I’m gonna get some heat for this’ I would look in the Bible for different verses. Back then it didn’t bother me as much to alter it around a little bit, you know who am I tell?”
“So I started looking outside the box on how to put this character together and he would — he didn’t even tell me this, but I heard him tell ‘Once the music starts you are that person,’ you know I probably took it a step further because I stayed that person for the first five or six years, but he had so many good innovative ways to put things together and to look at different aspects of the business that no one got.”
“Jake never was a screamer and that was something I knew I wasn’t gonna be. I knew it was gonna be a slow, methodical promo and then when Paul Bearer came along it was easy because he had that high-pitched creepy thing that got people and then I would come in with you know, ‘Rest In Peace.’”
“You had people screaming and hollering, but unless the message is good they’re not really listening, you know? But someone starts talking low, what the Hell’s he saying? He’s gonna put you in the ground and the worms are gonna eat your rotting flesh? Just stuff that people hadn’t heard in the wrestling world. Thank goodness they became enthralled in the morbid stuff we’re doing and it just really gelled well.”
