Mojo Rawley Was Opposed To His WWE Face Paint Gimmick

After spending much of his WWE career as a "hype" babyface, Mojo Rawley debuted a heel gimmick in early 2019 where he was clad in face paint. The new character would debut in a match against Apollo Crews in May 2019, but it was dropped only a few months later and Mojo would return to his babyface ways after WWE signed Rob Gronkowski.

Rawley has since been released by WWE and the former 24/7 Champion revealed to Chris Van Vliet that he was opposed to the face paint gimmick.

"Brother, I was so against that. I really didn't wanna do that. Truthfully though, the way the sketches came back, they didn't look half bad and I was like, 'I hope when I wear this, it looks this cool' and it couldn't be furthest from. We had these promos. I pitched this idea of like, you know, everybody looks at themselves in a mirror, everybody hypes themselves up, everyone has that degree of vanity, let me run with it. Let me cut promos, berating someone for any shortcomings and failures and you don't know who I'm talking to. You might think it's Zack [Ryder], you might think it's whoever I'm in a program with, drop subtle hints, you find out later it's me and now we can take this whole new attitude and run with it. There's a couple ways we were gonna go with it and somehow, that morphed into me losing my mind and drawing on my face and I don't know what it became," Rawley stated.

Mojo also reflected on his debut match with Apollo Crews.

"We literally did one match with that character. Me and Apollo [Crews] were paired together on a Europe tour and I remember, you know, it was two-and-a-half-weeks of every day working together and we put on some great matches. Him and I always had great chemistry. I thought that there was so much there that we pitched together and against each other, but we put on matches that nobody was really expecting out of us and the fans really gravitated on and it's hard when you got two guys who have zero TV time, [when] it's a cold match and you're going out there following all these rivalries and it was in the reports every night by the producers like, 'Hey, these two are really, really on to something. Let's give them a run,'" Mojo continued.

"So they booked Apollo for my debut match in this character and we were stoked. 'Dude, this is it for us. Let's go out there and kill it, show everybody what we got and this is gonna be our first real opportunity to not do one of these two-minute TV matches where you can't show anybody anything,' and then we found out it was a 60-second match that was more or less written out entirely for us. So, two-and-a-half-weeks of killing it turned into that. We were just like [sigh] and that was that. Character over. It's like, 'Alright.'"

Since his WWE release, Rawley has appeared in the trailer for Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins and he revealed to TMZ he is excited to do "everything" going forward.

H/T to POST Wrestling