The Judgement Day has become one of the most popular groups in the WWE and they’ve managed to do so mostly without the involvement of their founder, Edge. “The Rated-R Superstar” first formed the group after turning heel on AJ Styles leading up to their WrestleMania 38 match, resulting in Damian Priest and Rhea Ripley joining forces with the 11-time world champion. He then added Finn Balor to the faction on the June 6, 2022 episode of Raw, only for Balor to immediately kick the WWE Hall of Famer out. Edge has been feuding with Balor, Priest, Ripley (and later Dominik Mysterio) ever since, which will culminate in a Hell in a Cell match against Balor at WrestleMania 39 next month.
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Edge explained on the latest After The Bell Podcast that he always wanted Balor, Ripley and Priest as members of his faction. But he quickly realized that fans weren’t gravitating to the group because they didn’t buy his most recent heel turn.ย
“I honestly thought we would maybe get to this (Judgement Day turning on him) part of the story, now. You have to make due and figure it out. Thankfully, they were given the reigns to take this in a different direction, an entirely different direction than it would have with Edge at the helm because with Edge at the helm, it’s swimming upstream because we’re trying to get an audience to turn on a character, but they know the backstory of this character, they know the real life story, they know Adam’s story, so it’s like, ‘We don’t want to hate this guy because he fought back for something that he wanted back. He’s also doing something that no one has ever done before,” he explained (h/t Fightful).ย
“He’s wrestling with a triple fusion in his neck.’ No one has ever done that. It can be hard to hate that. I was trying. I was trying every old school heel trick in the book. It just wasn’t going to work. It might have, eventually, with more time, but it would have taken a lot more work. Thankfully, all four of them, with the addition of Dom, have taken this thing in completely different directions. They’re more themselves, and when you can be more yourself, chances are it’s going to work because you’re going to inject the actual person behind the character with some reality, truths, and actual interests in a way you would actually speak,” he added.
