Pro-wrestling star Levi Cooper (fka as Tucker in WWE) recently spoke with Wrestling Inc. about a wide range of topics, including how top industry name Daniel Bryan is this generation’s Bret Hart, and how he picked Bryan’s brain during their time together in WWE. Highlights are below.
How Daniel Bryan is like Bret Hart:
“To me, Daniel Bryan is the modern day Bret Hart. He’s the man. He’s the best. Whether it comes to his mind and talking through how and why we’re going to do things or whether it comes to the execution of said thing in the ring, I don’t think you or me could point out somebody or defend somebody better than him at either of those two things. What a glorious opportunity it was for us to be able to pick his brain a little bit and kind of see how he moved around the Heavy Machinery pieces. ‘What do you guys do?’ Having a discussion about the ethos, if you will, of Heavy Machinery and that might be able to play off of them in the large scale, in the big picture.”
On picking Bryan’s brain:
“Well, how does that sort of equate to the minutia? How do we do the micro here on the day-to-day. What does the promo look like? What do the matches look like? What are the beats of the story that we’re telling? And also just kind of seeing how he operates, seeing what questions he’s asking what people and why he’s going about doing those things, at least for me, I was trying to take away as much of that kind of stuff as I possibly could from working with someone like that.”