Ali provides details about the character he portrayed.
While WWE was filming their Raw and SmackDown programs out of the Performance Center during the COVID-19 pandemic, a 'Hacker' character was introduced on television.
The character was revealed to be Mustafa Ali, and Ali dove into that while being interviewed by Justin Dhillon of The Wrestling Classic. He said the plan was for Nic Nemeth to be his first program because Ali, The Hacker, got involved in a storyline involving Mandy Rose, Sonya Deville, Nemeth, and Otis. Otis and Nemeth ended up going one-on-one at WrestleMania 36.
Ali revealed that the hacker character faded out because of a power struggle between Bruce Prichard and Paul Heyman when the Raw and SmackDown writing teams were split. In the summer of 2020, the creative teams were merged, and Prichard took over as the lead while Heyman focused on his on-screen role. Ali believes both shows wanted the character and added that there was a fight over it.
“The only actual creative plan that I knew about (as ‘The Hacker’) was that the first program, the first feud was gonna be me and Dolph Ziggler. Dolph was doing this romance story with Mandy Sacs and Otis and then there was gonna be a WrestleMania blow-off, and the idea that I leak footage, or somehow I inform Mandy that Dolph’s intentions aren’t true and Sonya’s in on it, yada, yada. So that’s as far as that went. They had the ‘Mania match, I did the Hacker reveal and then the character just died. The reason the character died is because there was a dynamic power shift at the time where Raw had its own writer and SmackDown had its own writer. I think it was Paul Heyman and Bruce Prichard, and there was some sort of power struggle with that and ultimately, the character suffered because of that. I believe both shows wanted the character, and there was like a fight over it… I suffer from being too popular, legit (he joked).”
Ali further spoke about the character and recalled that before revealing he was the hacker, he would do voiceovers for his segments. He remembers fans taking the audio, decoding it, and being able to make out his voice.
To throw them off, he had Xavier Woods record a voiceover, and there was one week when a fan decoded the audio, and it was a woman's voice. Ali revealed that it was his wife who recorded that audio.
“I’m really tight friends with some of the social media people from WWE and they would give me the metrics for what the Hacker stuff does… At one point, people thought I was CM Punk. Then they thought it was Xavier Woods… Fans are crazy, in a good way. I was doing these voiceovers and people would take software and slow down the voiceover and decode it and then you could hear my voice clearly. So then I had Xavier Woods do a voiceover for me one time. I had my wife do a voiceover. I had all these different people do voiceovers. At one point, they thought it was Sasha (Banks). So it creates this sense of, well, who’s this person gonna be? The hacker character died because of this power struggle. Just went away…”
Present day, Ali is currently with TNA Wrestling and is playing a politician-esque character. The latest from Ali is that he had a run-in with Cedric Alexander. To read more, click here.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Wrestling Classic with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.
