TNA's Joe Hendry Reveals Origins of His Fan-Favorite Musician Gimmick

Hendry wanted to become the "Justin Timberlake" of a hardcore promotion.

By Liam Crowley

Say his name and he appears. Those six words have preceded some of the biggest pops TNA Wrestling has heard this year, as fans in the Impact Zone has regularly exploded for the arrival of Joe Hendry. Hendry has been enjoying a career year in 2024, surging in popularity thanks to the smash success of his personalized theme song as well as his fan-favorite feud with AJ Francis (formerly known as WWE's Top Dolla). That self-composed entrance theme, "I Believe in Joe Hendry," has swept the wrestling world, reaching unprecedented milestones as it topped the United Kingdom's iTunes chart.

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(Photo: TNA)

"I think something that people need to realize about professional wrestling is this is a lot of the time the skillset that you have outside of wrestling is what will pay dividends in your career," Hendry told ComicBook. "If you're just a wrestler, think about how many wrestlers that there are. You have to think about wrestling like a variety show. Where are you going to fit on that show? It's very easy for me to describe my act. I am the musician wrestler. That's how you would describe that act. If you go deeper, a level deeper than that, I could talk about the videos where I make fun of my opponents and things like that."

While self-composed entrance themes are nothing new in professional wrestling, Hendry's taunting tactics set him apart from the rest. The Prestigious One creates parody music videos that run down his opponents, a move he has utilized since his days on the British independent circuit. 

Hendry has created tunes inspired by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", Adele's "Hello", and even crafted a mockery of WWE's Drew Mcintyre set to Eiffel 65's "Blue" when the two feuded in Scotland's Insane Championship Wrestling.

It was in that very promotion that Hendry found the inspiration to craft his musician-wrestler persona over one decade ago.

"I started training in 2013 and towards the end of the year I went to ICW to watch one of their live events. Something that's so underrated is before you debut for a promotion, you should go and watch that promotion from the perspective of a fan and understand the show," Hendry recalled. "Because I did that and I watched ICW from start to finish, I was like, 'Damn, every match is a hardcore match.' Every match is chaos. Every song that these wrestlers have was just all very much like that sort of new metal sound from start to finish.

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"What if I went in the total opposite direction? I'll be the Justin Timberlake of this organization, the pop singer. Something like that. I've often found when you can look at a company and when you run in the opposite direction of what everybody else is doing, that's when you tend to have most success in my view."

Hendry currently competes for TNA Wrestling which airs its weekly TNA iMPACT! every Thursday at 8 PM ET on AXS TV.

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