Brian Gewirtz Reveals How Young Rock Cast a Young Vince McMahon
Last week's episode of Young Rock saw actor Adam Ray make his debut as a young Vince McMahon, [...]
Last week's episode of Young Rock saw actor Adam Ray make his debut as a young Vince McMahon, months away from buying the Capitol Wrestling Corporation from his father and just a few years away from introducing the wrestling world to WrestleMania. On-screen depictions of the WWE Chairman are incredibly rare, but Young Rock executive producer (and former WWE head writer) Brian Gewirtz was more than up to the challenge of integrating McMahon into the show.
"It was a lot of fun. Adam Ray is a very, very skilled comedian/actor and we hired him," Gewirtz said. "He does a huge standup and I got to know down here and it was great putting him into Vince's suit — circa-1982 Vince suits, of course. It's an interesting time because Vince... He's on the cusp of taking over but he hadn't taken over yet. So he's still working for his dad."
Gewirtz said wrestling fans should pay close attention whenever an episode cuts to McMahon in his office, as there are a number of Easter eggs scattered throguhout.
"We wanted to make sure his office... I don't want to like spoil anything, but there's posters in the office that both current Vince and [Dwayne Johnson] himself would definitely appreciate. DJ actually making a lot of suggestions for it," he added.
As someone who worked in WWE for nearly two decades Gewirtz knows McMahon better than most, and addressed what he feels is th biggest misconception fans have about him.
"I would say to anyone...the snarky ones who sit back and go, 'the old man's lost it,' or 'he's not attached,' or what have you, I would say you don't mean Vince," Gewirtz explained. "I think the best example is us sitting around the room one day and then, almost at the top of his head, he pitches the entire Nexus ankles — if you recall from 2010 when all the NXT guys turned on [John] Cena and stripped the ring. It was very, very highly buzzed about. It just seemed like maybe the idea did percolate in his head, but he verbalized it for the first time in the meeting. We were all looking at each other like, 'wow, that was absolutely amazing.' He might not be up on the latest social trends or whatever, but the mad genius still exists and probably always will."
Episode 4 of Young Rock airs Tuesday, March 16 on NBC at 8 p.m. ET.