10 Times A WWE Wrestler Broke Character On Camera

3. Michael Cole Becomes Great For A Night

Moving to a serious place one last time, we mentioned earlier in the list that sometimes it’s up to the broadcast team to relate serious, real-life news to the people watching at home.

On the September 10 2012 episode of Raw, Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler suffered a heart attack during a match between Team Hell No and the Prime Time Players, not an unfair reaction to watching Titus O’Neil wrestle.

Michael Cole gets a lot of stick but, as it’s been said before, and it’s absolute right, he was brilliant in the fallout. Not knowing whether his friend was dead or alive, he handled medical updates with grace, sensitivity and utter professionalism.

What makes it all the more remarkable was that up until this point, Cole was had still been in his heel persona, not as obnoxious as he had been the year before in his feud with Lawler, but still vaguely on the side of the heels.

After his masterful handling of the Lawler situation, Cole actually broke character with such success that he turned full babyface again in the weeks that followed.

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2. Any time Randy Gets Bored 

Genuinely all of the times that Randy Orton broke character could be its own top ten list.

From the time he flipped off the crowd on camera, to the time he did a random star-jump after RKOing Mark Henry, to eating a hot dog whilst selling an attack from wacky Dean Ambrose, corpsing at New Day asking him how many groups he’s been in, asking Sheamus what’s my line during a promo battle, killing one of the Singhs and pulling a whoops face, asking a member of the audience if the show is off the air so he could stop selling, basically older not-giving-a-shit Randy Orton is awesome, and to emphasize that point, here’s him being a genuinely nice fella.

At Survivor Series 2016, Shane McMahon took a hella bump, with Roman plucking him out of a coast to coast with a spear, giving him a whopper concussion.

It’s clear to anyone that something’s wrong, and as medical personnel flock to the ring, the camera picks up Randy Orton moving outside of the ring to the bottom left corner of the screen.

That’s Orton going over to console Shane’s kids, letting them know that their dad is going to be ok. That’s nice. That’s kind.

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1. It’s Live, Pal

Is it Sid? Of course it is. The most infamous moment of a wrestler-breaking character in the history of the business, of course it’s Sid.

Now it’s not very nice to call someone dumb, but apparently Sid is on record saying that he has half the brain that I do, so I think it’s ok. It’s the live free for all pre-show to the first-ever In Your House pay-per-view in May 1995.

Diesel is defending the WWF title against the master and ruler of the world, Sid and oh man, it’s lucky this was on the live pre-show, I keep mentioning that it was the LIVE pre-show because apparently no one f**king told Sid, who, when asked how he would address his doubters, stumbles over his words before saying ‘let me do this again’, to which JR responds, it’s live pal, before quick as a flash Sid finishes the promo, JR signing off, ‘there you have it, a man of few words’.

A few, but still too many. 

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