Edge is happy to see that his former group, The Judgment Day, is thriving in WWE.
The Hall of Famer spoke on this topic during a recent interview on After The Bell, where he explained the uphill battle the group faced with him at the helm due to his real-life story and fans not wanting to boo him. Edge adds that each member of the group (Damian Priest, Rhea Ripley, Finn Balor and Dominik Mysterio) are talents he kept an eye on since their NXT days, and how all have risen to the occasion to showcase themselves. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says Judgment day has turned into something much better than he originally anticipated:
It’s turned into something entirely different, and better, quite honestly. Where it’s at now is the goal I had in mind. I really thought the concept of The Judgment Day, the idea behind it was, ‘here are these talented individuals who I truly felt weren’t getting the opportunity that they deserved, and if they got that opportunity, they could fly with it.’ I had been watching them all since NXT and kind of kept tabs on them and kept my eye on them all these years. When I was asked about starting a group, and was asked who would be in it, the first names I said were Priest, Ripley, Balor. It changed and morphed and went through a lot of different permutations.
How the group wasn’t going to succeed with him at the helm since his real-life backstory made him a natural babyface:
Thankfully, they were given the reigns to take this in a different direction, an entirely different direction than it would have with Edge at the helm because with Edge at the helm, it’s swimming upstream because we’re trying to get an audience to turn on a character, but they know the backstory of this character, they know the real life story, they know Adam’s story, so it’s like, ‘We don’t want to hate this guy because he fought back for something that he wanted back. He’s also doing something that no one has ever done before. He’s wrestling with a triple fusion in his neck.’ No one has ever done that. It can be hard to hate that. I was trying. I was trying every old school heel trick in the book. It just wasn’t going to work. It might have, eventually, with more time, but it would have taken a lot more work. Thankfully, all four of them, with the addition of Dom, have taken this thing in completely different directions. They’re more themselves, and when you can be more yourself, chances are it’s going to work because you’re going to inject the actual person behind the character with some reality, truths, and actual interests in a way you would actually speak.
Edge will be taking on Finn Balor inside Hell in a Cell at WrestleMania 39.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)