PJ Black Recalls Working With Bray Wyatt On An ‘Esoteric, Occultish’ Shaman Character

The former Justin Gabriel discussed working on an evolution of his character with Bray Wyatt. 

Outside of his time in the Nexus, PJ Black, formerly Justin Gabriel, never had much depth to his character on WWE TV. However, that doesn’t mean that ideas for his character ever stopped coming to mind. Now, Black has revealed that he worked with Bray Wyatt on an esoteric character with occult-like vibes. 

Appearing on the Developmentally Speaking podcast, Black discussed the importance of evolving your character over time and gave insight into the character he was developing with Wyatt. 

“I feel like the older I get, the character’s evolving all the time. You have to evolve, or you get left behind. I pitch so many cool characters,” he recalled. “I actually had a shaman character I was pitching to everybody, and WWE loved it. They were like, ‘Oh, it’s a little bit weird, it’s a little bit fringe.’ I was like, ‘Exactly, that’s the point. The character needs to ask more questions.’ Bray Wyatt was helping me out at the time, so that was the character like that. It was very esoteric, occultish. It would have been fun. I would have loved to bring that character to life. I spent so much money on the gear, and the new music, and then life happened. and the character kind of briefly appeared on The Young Bucks’ YouTube show, mixing a little potion together, and that was gonna be the start, it was gonna evolve from there, but that also didn’t go anywhere. That’s wrestling. There’s so many shows on TV these days, it’s hard to keep up with everything, and there’s so much great talent on the independent circuit and all over the world now.”

Black went into further detail about his relationship with Wyatt. He noted that Windham Rotunda was one of his first friends upon moving to Florida, and they frequently exchanged ideas about character work.

“He was one of my first friends when I moved to Florida, so we always had that strong bond, and he wanted to help. He loved that stuff. That was him. He was cool. He loved what I was doing, too. He was like, ‘You should try this,’ and try it around. I don’t know if that promo is floating around online. It came out really well, but it’s really weird. It’s kind of like the Wyatt stuff, but even a step further. People were like, ‘Huh?’ [Laughs]” 

Elsewhere in the interview, Black spoke about potentially returning to WWE as a trainer. Learn more here. 

PJ Black is currently injured. Stay up to date with the latest injuries in wrestling by using our resources section. 

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