Samoa Joe says rumors that WWE originally wanted him to play the Umaga character are false, and considered the comparisons between the characters to be racist.
During a recent interview with PopCulture.com (h/t to Bleeding Cool), Joe commented on the rumors of him portraying the character, saying it was never an option:
“It absolutely, positively, couldn’t be any more false. We never talked, like… What people didn’t get is, they couldn’t talk to me legally. I think I still had two years on my contract, I wasn’t going anywhere. So, it’s funny, I think people thought you could just walk away from a deal at that time. You couldn’t. We never talked, I was never even brought up to be Umaga.”
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Joe continued, saying he thought the comparison between the two characters was racist:
“I thought it was mad racist, cause it was like, I had just come on TNA and I was Samoa Joe, and it was like this prominently featured Samoan character, and then it was like, oh, well this is WWE’s answer to Samoa Joe, right? No. You wouldn’t do that if it was any other… Right? It was mad racist to me.
Why would you come up with that comparative, because he’s like… we weren’t even the same character! We weren’t even remotely anything like each other. But the fact that I was Samoan and he was Samoan, we were the same character. And I was like, what…what are you talking…? That’s the comparison you draw?”
