Matt Hardy says Darby Allin is really catching on with fans, and he’s glad he could be a great adversary for him.
Hardy spoke with ET Canada’s Shakiel Mahjouri about his TNT Championship match with Darby Allin on AEW’s first episode of Dynamite running unopposed on April 14. The show drew 1.219 million viewers and nearly set a company record for viewership, second only to the Dynamite debut in October 2019.
Hardy praised Allin as a “ratings guy” and said there are similarities between Darby and his brother, Jeff Hardy, then talked about how the final number ended up blowing away their expectations.
“It was super exciting, it was our first week unopposed, so I was very happy to be in that slot. And Darby is starting to prove to be a ratings guy because people really like him. And he gets it so much. He reminds me of my brother in so many ways as to how he sells from underneath. He gets sympathy and he’s just he’s cool. The kids like him. He’s super cool. And me at this stage of the game, being an older competitor, especially with the younger AEW audience,” Hardy explained, “I am the perfect bad guy, I think, for a Darby Allin or someone like that. So I was expecting them to be big. I hoped we would break a million and do a good number. But when we heard 1.2, I was blown away and super happy, super excited. And I really think it was a good payoff because people didn’t know when they tuned in if Darby Allin was going to lose the TNT title or retain the title. And I think that was part of the charm of it.”
In regards to Jeff, Matt was asked how he felt about working on shows that were counter-programming what his brother was doing. Matt said they still text each other before shows, but it’s not a competition between the two and they are more supportive of each other than anything.
“We always text each other before the shows. We go, ‘Hey, man, are you on tonight or when you are or what are you doing?’ We just kind of keep up with it. I don’t think there’s any competition any longer. I think we’re just both supportive of one another. So it’s cool. We’ve almost done it enough where there was a point where I was in WWE and he was in TNA. Or he was in TNA and I was in ROH. I mean, we’ve kind of done this before,” Hardy noted, “so it’s kind of an old hat in some ways. But we’re now more than ever just supportive of one another.”
