While hardcore WWE fans knew that Glenn Jacobs (f.k.a. Isaac Yankem, DDS) was behind Kane's mask, the mystery of what the Big Red Machine's face looked like persisted for years.
In 2003, Kane removed his mask during a heated feud with Triple H. Initially portrayed as scarred—with some very questionable hair and makeup choices—Kane returned the following week looking surprisingly normal.
Kane never officially retired from WWE after moving into politics. In a new interview, the Hall of Famer revealed who decided that it was time for The Undertaker's "brother" to remove his mask.
"It was my idea. I talked to Vince about it," Kane confirmed. "My perspective was as a performer. I felt that being under the mask, I don’t want to say run its course, because it was a really cool character. It still worked. But there were constraints, limitations that put on me."
"Obviously, the biggest ones, I couldn’t use my face to show people emotion, which is the most important thing. I just didn’t talk. I talked more when I had the mouthless mask, but I still wasn’t talking that much," he continued. "And I just felt that I could do more, and I felt that I was kind of being stifled."
Despite what we saw during his initial unmasking, Kane always wanted to make it so that his character's "scars" were internal, not external.
"I got this idea from the book The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, which is part of the Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs stuff," he shared. "The antagonist in The Red Dragon had a cleft lip that had been surgically repaired, and he had a mustache. You couldn’t even tell he had any sort of deformity at all."
"But he’d also been abused as a kid, so in his mind, he was this horrific, disfigured monster, but he was just a normal-looking dude," Kane continued. "That’s what made him so scary, because it was all inside. And that’s what I thought it’d be about Kane. What if he doesn’t have any scars, but he’s so messed up that he thinks he does?"
"That kind of got lost, because everything moves so quickly," he added. "But yeah, that’s where that came from."
Kane went on to say that Vince McMahon decided that he should be bald and "a complete departure" from what we'd seen before. While he would later go back to wearing the mask, an even bigger change came when he joined The Authority as "Corporate Kane."
Reflecting on that, he said, "The idea of Corporate Kane was that Corporate Kane was never supposed to wrestle. He was just a mouthpiece, and then when the Authority needed an enforcer, that’s when Kane put on the mask. But they were never supposed to touch the guy in the suit. That whole thing got completely lost. And because of that, I just end up getting beat up by everybody."
You can hear more from Kane in the player below.