Earlier this year, WWE played an angle where Erick Rowan carried around a cage for multiple weeks. It was them revealed to be a fake spider, which was a disappointment to many fans.
During an interview with SportsKeeda, Rowan (now named Erick Red Beard) revealed what was originally supposed to be inside the cage, along with some of his rejected ideas.
When he was first given the gimmick, he wasn’t told what was going to be inside the cage, later finding out that it would be a giant rodent or rat which would be destroyed by the babyface to show that Rowan ”cared about something”.
The babyface originally set to destroy the cage turned heel, so the reveal was pushed back even further. Rowan mentioned that he began to pitch ideas for the contents of the cage however they were rejected. He was then told that a giant robotic spider would be revealed as the caged creature.
“All that build for something so trivial was kinda sucky for me,” he added. “Cause we go to work and we put in all these things and you have all these ideas in your head, and then that’s what it is. I sent messages to Heyman. I sent messages to the writers. I wrote out long things about what I thought it should be. Here’s what we could pitch. I had over the top ideas about it.”
Rowan revealed that his first pitch was to keep the worlds smallest woman and actress, Jyoti Amge, in the cage. Amge appeared in the movie American Horror Story. They would then form a friendship as Rowan would protect Amge from the outside world.
“I’m so large and she would be so small, and delicate. It would show a different side of me to the fans,” he explained. “Everyone is trying to humanize people in wrestling these days, and I thought the most un-human characters are the best. That’s the most intriguing when you watch a movie. You watch a movie and you see people that you can relate to as being your creepy uncles in prison. That’s interesting to me. And that’s what I like. I like the horrors of the world and how they have feelings as well, but no one can sympathize with them because they’re such horrible people.”
The other idea was to have no living thing inside the cage, instead every time a wrestler looked into the cage, it would show their worst fear, however that was also rejected.
The storyline ended when Drew McIntyre destroyed the cage during an episode of Raw, revealing the contents as the giant robotic spider. Rowan was later part of the mass release of talent in April.
Special thanks to Pro Wrestling Sheet for the transcription. You can check out the full interview below
