Sami Callihan Doesn’t Believe NXT Understood His Hacking Gimmick

Sami Callihan recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet about his run in WWE NXT and how he doesn’t believe the company understood his hacking gimmick.

Callihan stated that he wanted the gimmick to be creepy, but in a different way from someone like Bray Wyatt or The Undertaker, but he feels that it was perhaps ahead of its time.

That’s not shitting on WWE. It’s just, they didn’t understand it at all and I think it was a little before its time. We really didn’t even get to pull the trigger on the hacker/cyberpunk character at all. It was something me and Dusty Rhodes had really written out and came up with ideas. It was something I came up with for being a video game nerd and watching the movie Hackers. I was thinking of ideas for NXT and I wanted to be a different style of creepy. I didn’t want to be like the Bray Wyatt or Undertaker style, I wanted to be something that was new age. I remember, ‘what scares my dad?’ He used to say, ‘Everyone thinks Freddy and Jason are scary. You know what’s scary? That movie Hackers. They can just wipe your whole bank account.’ That always clicked in my brain. Now, I think this is the perfect time to do it seeing how big Black Mirror and Mr. Robot are. This is something that can transcend an entire generation of wrestling.”

Callihan revealed he actually wanted to do the character in EVOLVE, but Gabe Sapolsky convinced him to save it for WWE.

“I had this idea right before NXT and I wanted to do it in EVOLVE. Gabe [Sapolsky] was like, ‘This character is dope, you should wait and save it for NXT.’ I went to NXT, I pulled it out, and someone in the office goes, ‘Why would a hacker wrestle?’ I was like, ‘Why would The Undertaker wrestle? He strikes people with lightning bolts.’ It just didn’t click. I didn’t click.”

H/T to Fightful.com for transcriptions.