Former WWE star Charie Haas recently appeared on Insight With Chris Van Vilet to discuss a number of different topics, including his thoughts on Team Angle splitting up, and how he had trouble finding his character afterwards. He later talks about his impersonation gimmick, one that he admits he was not proud of. Highlights are below.
On Team Angle splitting up too soon:
“It should have been longer. What people don’t understand is at the time that we were getting hot on Team Angle [on SmackDown], who was getting hot on Raw, and that was Evolution. But when they have 4 guys and you have 3, when they do the mixed pay-per-views, we are starting to get a better reaction than them. I don’t care what they say, you can ask Kurt that, Shelton may not say because he is with WWE now, but we were getting a better reaction than they were. And I think that had a lot to do with ok it’s time to split them, because they kept Evolution going. That’s just the way it is.”
On having trouble finding his character after the split:
“I’ll be honest with you man, I was lost. I was always a tag team wrestler, I was never a singles wrestler. Then all of a sudden, who is Charlie Haas? I had a really great match with RVD and a great match with Rico, and they put me with Rico, and we won the tag titles there. That was tough because I loved the character and I loved working with Rico, but other tag teams refused to work with us because they didn’t want to be in the ring with Rico because of the character. It hurt him a lot and I knew he was upset about that, and some of them took it out on him in the ring physically when they had to, it was uncalled for with some of the stuff that he went through. I think today he is suffering through concussions and all that stuff, he is having some mental issues right now. But we had a great tag team, we won the tag team titles, that was really cool.”
He was not proud of the impersonation gimmick:
“I think that was when they were really trying to get rid of me and find a way to get me out of there. But I looked at it as a chance to honor the people that I grew up watching and embrace it. I did the best that I could, I didn’t want people saying ‘He has a bad attitude, let’s get him out of there.’ It’s crazy, I get so many people coming up to me about me doing this character or that character. It’s part of my career that I look back at and I did it because I had to. I am not proud of it; it was not something that I wanted my career to be based on. But I guess a lot of people watched it, because I get more people coming up to me, I guess they liked it.”
On who he regrets impersonating:
“If you are honoring them and they enjoy it, then that’s good. The only one I didn’t like was when I had to do JR. I don’t know what was going on with JR and WWE at that time, but they wanted me to really make fun of him. He’s the guy that signed me to my WWE contract, and my feet were put to the fire with that. I wasn’t too happy about that. I apologized to him for it, and I wish I put my foot down and said I don’t want to do that. But I didn’t have the pull to say we were not going to go in that direction. It wasn’t fair to him and it was wrong.”
Full interview is below.