Arn Anderson Says He Pitched A “Unabomber” Style Gimmick For Brodie Lee While In The WWE

One of the topics that has often been brought up in the days following Brodie Lee’s death is how WWE utilized him during his time in the company as Luke Harper. Despite being a former Intercontinental Champion and 2-time SmackDown Tag Team Champion, Lee was often lost in the shuffle and considered one of the company’s most underutilized talents.

Arn Anderson and Chris Jericho had a chance to talk about Lee on a recent Talk Is Jericho, where he revealed he once pitched an idea for Brodie Lee in the WWE. During his time as a backstage producer in the company, Anderson saw early glimpses of the man who would eventually become The Exalted One in AEW and pitched the creative team a gimmick where Lee would go against the type WWE often saw him as and instead become a more menacing and intellectual monster. Anderson wound up comparing it to domestic terrorist The Unabomber.

“I heard one time he was told that he doesn’t sound like a hillbilly, and that’s what’s holding him back. ‘He’s too intelligent when he speaks.’ I had a character for him that would have been awesome, as frightening as anybody has been. What about the guy that looks like that, especially when he wore the dirty, dingy white ‘wife-beater’, and it was even a little muddy even on some nights.”

“What if you got a shot from somebody in a tree or something, and you’re shooting into a window and you got a single light bulb and it really looks like a primitive, almost I’m expecting the camera to pan down like you got some guy tied up and you’re torturing them or something. What if that guy is sitting with a computer, and he’s rattling away. And you made that guy The Unabomber.”

“He’s brilliant. He’s making stuff. He’s going over the injuries. He somehow got ahold of all the records of all the crew with their injuries. What is he going to attack next, kind of game planning. His voice is eloquent. You make him a genius. How scary would that guy have been? Well, when I tried to lay that out to creative, they looked at me like I got six heads as you can imagine.”

It had long been said that Vince McMahon lost interest in Lee when he found out he couldn’t do a convincing southern accent. Years after Arn pitched this gimmick to the WWE, Lee eventually found himself as an eloquent speaking gentleman monster as The Exalted One of the Dark Order. While we may never know what could have been had someone given Lee the chance to do this in the WWE, we got glimpses of what he could have been in the competitor he became in AEW.

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