10 Wrestlers Who Didn't Care About Kayfabe
3. Mick Foley
Mick Foley wasn't married to the concept of kayfabe, and the irony, re: all of the dreaded discourse wrapped around it, is that a performer with no regard for the code better advanced the industry than so many who do; a superb performer in a field most were too selfish to excel in, Foley was a genius at getting his peers over.
Foley openly presented the idea that professional wrestling was a larger-than-life spectacle populated by characters, not people, and used its scripted platform to express the different recesses of his personality. He explored his run in the WWF not as sport but as drama therapy for a damaged and dangerous man, and it doubled as a tremendous means of refusing to allow himself to grow stale under the punishing grind of episodic television.
He wasn't beyond abusing kayfabe explicitly - his bizarre TNA run was none more meta - and even in the WWF, he famously claimed that he wouldn't "sell" the "abortion" that was the People's Elbow.
It was consistent with Foley's drive and experience, and the perspective he consequently developed; he thrived on enduring real pain to set his matches apart as spectacles, and when this awful toil was not recognised by a shrugging mainstream, he shrugged at their traditions.