In the final segment of WWE RAW on March 25, 2024, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made Cody Rhodes bleed. While appearing on Logan Paul’s podcast, Paul “Triple H” Levesque gave his stance on the use of blood and profanity in WWE.
He said, “In a movie, I would rather watch a movie that has incredible drama and an incredible build to one gunshot than watch a movie with just hundreds of people firing machine guns and no one’s getting shot or whatever. I’d rather build and get to the scene in the movie where the one shot happens and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, can you believe he fucking shot him? And like, Holy shit, that’s unbelievable.’ There’s been times when we as a company, say we’re PG and we’ve been G, like way G-rated. I believe there’s a time for things to work. There’s a time for everything. But it’s got to be done in moderation. It’s got to be done when it’s right. Because if you don’t, if everything you say is disgusting, who cares? You just tune that out and it doesn’t matter. But right now, we’re so clean on it that Rock says something, given his position and the disruptor and the guy coming in from the outside, it’s believable that he has that leeway, doesn’t care. He can do those things, and it’s shocking because it’s not been that way. Cody gets busted open the other day. It’s shocking, especially in the right scenario. It was powerful, meant a lot. That happens all the time. Who cares? You know what I mean?
It’s not a shift of philosophy. It’s just when it’s needed, pull the trigger. But the discipline is only pulling the trigger when it really means something and when it’s shocking, not when it’s just, we should do this. ‘Yeah, I should just use a bunch of profanity today.’ It doesn’t matter. You don’t need it. It’s a crutch, to be honest. All that stuff is a crutch. I lived through the attitude era. Look, when we put matches together, every third word is the F-bomb, right? It’s just how it is, and that’s how people talk, but just dialog to really have it be meaningful. It’s got to be here and there. I lived through a time period where blood was like an everyday thing, and it started to not mean anything.
We’d be in a little town in the middle of nowhere, wrestling in front of 2000 people, and I’d look over at Flair, bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m like, ‘What are you doing, dude? What are you doing?’ And nobody cared. I didn’t even notice it happened because there was no big reaction to it or anything. It was all the time thing. It just can’t be that way to make it be impactful. You have to do it in moments when it means something. Do it big and do it in moments when it means something.
The bus thing with Rock and Cody was a holy shit moment for a lot of those reasons. Even Rock blurring the lines of putting content out after, ‘Don’t tell me to cut. I’ll do this when I want to do it.’ He’s going off, holy shit.”
Triple H is asked about the use of blood & swear words in WWE as of late [mainly from Rock] & gives his compelling perspective.
(@impaulsive) pic.twitter.com/qhYcnmSZkq
— Wrestle Ops (@WrestleOps) April 5, 2024
