Luke Gallows recently recalled the origins of his Freakin Deacon character and the advice Stephanie McMahon gave him for it. Gallows played the role in Deep South Wrestling, and he looked back at the character on the latest episode of Talk’n Shop. You can see highlights below, per Fightful:
On doing weird gimmick ideas in Deep South Wrestling: “I thought, ‘I have a fertile mind. Let me create a character where they have to look at me.’ I started doing all this weird shit. I was spiking my balding hair out because John Laurinaitis told me I had to grow hair because there were too many bald guys. I’m 20, looking 50. I have a skullet going like Damien Demento. I thought, ‘I want to take it a step further.’ There had already been a guy with a snake. There was already a snake in wrestling. What is the next thing that people are disgusted and put off by? A spider. I hate spiders. Most people do.
“I talked to, God rest his soul, the Original Assassin Jody Hamilton. ‘What do you think about this?’ ‘Go down to the damn pet store and get one. Let’s see what we can do with it.’ I went and bought a tarantula, pulled it out of the cage, and it bit me out of the gate. ‘What am I going to do with this?’ I started messing with it and I came up with this gimmick where I had a split personality. I was this bruising mean wrestler, but the spider would talk to me because I’m schizophrenic, and when the spider would talk to me, it would come through me, and the voice would be high-pitched, and I’d go into this weird promo, then I would slap myself in the face, ‘You will feel the wrath and fury of the Freakin Deacon.’ It was super weird, super Ultimate Warrior, Papa Shango magic crazy stuff.”
On Stephanie McMahon’s reaction to the character: “The promos were weird but it made everybody interested. A month after I started to do the promos, Stephanie McMahon saw me. She said, ‘You are really really weird.’ I want, ‘Ahhh.’ She goes, ‘Be as weird as you can be.'”
