Triple H Discusses Character Development, Believability, 50/50 Booking

WWE COO Triple H recently sat down with ESPN to help promote the launch of the WWE portion of their website. He discussed a number topics, including development of a wrestling character, believability of a performer, 50/50 booking, and more.

Below are some excerpts from the interview:

On development of wrestling characters:

“There are a lot of other guys [who] need to transform into something else,” Levesque said. “In their personal lives they’re quiet, or they’re reserved or whatever, and when the red light goes on and you give them a character that they can sink their teeth into, they become something great. If you knew Glenn Jacobs and you knew Kane, they’re two totally different things. That’s kind of the arc of what we do.”

On believability:

“We had a character, a kid in developmental, at one point in time, that came to me dressed in jeans and a ripped T-shirt,” Levesque said. “And he came to me to show me this character. This guy was the furthest possible thing you would ever think of being a badass. And I said, ‘Why are you wearing that?’

“He said, ‘It’s a new character I want to try. It’s me as an asskicker.’ And it just made me laugh. I was like, ‘I don’t care what you do, nobody is going to see you as that.’ It’s just people understanding what they can be taken as legitimately and how they can perform it in a way that’s believable.”

On “50/50 booking:”

“It’s just a term somebody came up with,” Levesque said. “It’s just terms that people throw out there.

“When somebody goes, ‘Well, you just can’t get people over with 50/50 booking,’ [I’ll always say] ‘Oh, I’m sorry, how’s your territory coming? Because this one seems to be doing pretty good over here.’ We just had the largest WrestleMania in history. People talk a lot of smack about ratings and things, but they don’t understand all of the dynamics of everything we do. They don’t. They sit on the internet and they read one thing and they give their point of view.”

You can find the entire interview at this link.

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