Matthew Rehwoldt Says The WWE Universe Wasn’t Given A Proper Illustration Of The Vaudevillains
Matthew Rehwoldt shares his thoughts on why The Vaudevillains didn’t work on WWE’s main roster.
Speaking with the Wrestling Perspective Podcast, Matthew Rehwoldt (formerly Aiden English in WWE) spoke about his and Simon Gotch’s transition from NXT to the main roster and why The Vaudevillains didn’t click the same way with the WWE Universe as they did in NXT. Here is what he said:
“So, I mean, in the case of The Vaudevillains, I think that was less of when should they have pulled the trigger or anything like that. That was more of a case of not giving the audience a proper illustration, a proper introduction to a character like that. That was at that time from NXT when there were tons of these very specific, defined, call it colorful, whatever you will, we were black and white, but characters that were very specific. I think they grew and gained popularity with that also very specific audience.
So when you transfer that to that stage, yes a lot of people might know it, but there’s a huge swath of the audience that doesn’t, and so when we come out there in this black and white entrance and Simon with the mustache, kind of doing the old-timey thing, you’re going to have a good number of people who are going like, ‘okay? I immediately kind of get it. There’s something old-fashioned about this.’ But then they just had us go out there and cut pro wrestling promos and you had to do it because they write it for you. You can ask to say X-Y-Z, but you pretty much got to do what you got to do. Then go out there and do run-ins and beat up the tag champs and it was like pro wrestling 101, which sometimes is fine, but for those characters, we needed explanation, some vignettes, some, ‘hey, here’s who we are. This is our philosophy. This our whole thing.’
Too, with that, was we’re not time travellers. We made the jokes with the time machine later on but that wasn’t the whole thing. We’re not pretending to be from 1908 or something. It was just that we believe in this old school style we present ourselves that way, and so we kind of believe in it in the modern world but none of that ever got translated. It was entirely lost in translation on that main roster and we were just kind of shoved out there into 101 wrestling; be a bad guy, beat up the good guys. You get very little time to explain who you are. I don’t know how they expected the audience to really catch on given that kind of scenario.”
Rehwoldt was released by WWE in April 2020. During the pandemic, he remained part of the wrestling world by frequently having wrestlers on his podcast, Straight Shooting.
He dubted with IMPACT Wrestling at their Homecoming event, winning the mixed tag team tournament alongside Deonna Purrazzo.
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