10 Wrestlers Who Visibly Hated Their Own Gimmicks

2. Stardust

stardust wwe
WWE.com

Cody maintains, on Twitter, that he was grateful for the Stardust Experience. "It was a professional low," he wrote recently, "but still fairly successful".

Fairly successful is right, incredibly; he was a regular fixture on RAW, competed in a superb Intercontinental Title ladder war at WrestleMania 31, and captured doubles gold alongside Goldust. Ignoring that Nicholas did and it thus means nothing, because Cody is a swell and important dude, he wasn't quite talking b*llocks, even if this patter whiffs of doing everything possible to avoid an onslaught of tiresome What Are The Lunatic Bangs Doing In The AEW Zone memes.

Cody as Stardust tried really, really hard to make something of this. Too hard, really; aiming for Lynchian disassociation but achieving Keanu Reeves in Dracula with an astonishingly poor thespian accent, the whole bit was f*cking baffling. The determination to make it work only exposed how much he evidently could not. It was a thankless task...

...a thankless task he perfected on one occasion. In a WWE.com exclusive, an animated and infuriated Stardust threatened to "cut the fat" out of WWE with a subtext of searing rage. His line readings were at once calculated and incoherent; here, he mirrored the character's head space, with one side of his personality tethered to earth, and the other lost in another world.

He was also vividly enraged about WWE's glass ceiling, and how woefully unequipped his disastrous act was to break it.

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Michael Sidgwick is an editor, writer and podcaster for WhatCulture Wrestling. With over seven years of experience in wrestling analysis, Michael was published in the influential institution that was Power Slam magazine, and specialises in providing insights into All Elite Wrestling - so much so that he wrote a book about the subject. You can order Becoming All Elite: The Rise Of AEW on Amazon. Possessing a deep knowledge also of WWE, WCW, ECW and New Japan Pro Wrestling, Michael’s work has been publicly praised by former AEW World Champions Kenny Omega and MJF, and current Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes. When he isn’t putting your finger on why things are the way they are in the endlessly fascinating world of professional wrestling, Michael wraps his own around a hand grinder to explore the world of specialty coffee. Follow Michael on X (formerly known as Twitter) @MSidgwick for more!