Ahead of WWE SummerSlam, Seth Rollins appeared on the SI Media Podcast with Jimmy Traina. Scroll down to listen to the entire interview.
Seth Rollins was asked who his best friend is:
“Well, my best friend is my wife. I don’t mean to be cheesy, but yeah, my best friend is my wife, Becky Lynch. We spend most of our time together whether it be parenting or working and it’s awesome. We just have a great relationship. We were friends before we were together romantically and so that has carried over. So we’re best friends. If you were to ask me who my best, like, non-romantic friend is, I would probably say Claudio Castagnoli, I think is probably my best friend. We’ve gone up and down the road together for over a decade in different promotions and we still keep in close contact. I talk to him virtually every single day, and so yeah, I mean, he’s probably number one.”
Rollins was asked what happened on the episode of RAW when he came to the ring and looked like he was upset talking to someone, left the ring, and never had a segment:
“That was not a big deal. I was upset but it was mostly just a production miscommunication. Was that the night after Mania, maybe? The intent of the segment was to go to break with the audience singing my song, allow them to sing during the break, come back up, they might still be singing, and then drift off into nothingness, you know, and just have a musical interlude for the RAW after Mania, but for whatever reason, that never made it through to production, and so when we go to commercial instead of just letting the crowd party, they did the thing where they blacked the house, shut down the music, and played the stupid video packages which messed up what the whole plan was. So the crowd was trying to sing but, you know, you’ve got Stone Cold Steve Austin talking about Broken Skull Ranch or whatever on the thing and DX. Like, did no one get the memo?”
“So it was just a production snafu, but in the middle of a commercial break, I’m yelling to try to get it turned off so they can keep singing, but it was already a disaster. The crowd was confused, didn’t know what to make of it, and then, you know, we came back into the rest of the segment, but it didn’t translate the way you would want it to because the crowd wasn’t able to participate the way the segment was meant to be planned. So I wasn’t really that upset about that. That was just a bad handling.”
“Now over the last decade or so I’ve been pretty upset in different instances. I would say the beginning of 2022 was the most angry I’ve ever been. There’s like two to three different instances that I’m not going to get into specifically, but like, essentially, from the Day 1 Pay-per-view to getting the match with Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania, that process was very frustrating for me. It ended in a good way and we got into a good place, but getting there was not ideal and I very much voiced my concerns at that point in time.”
“What I was told leading into the Day 1 Pay-per-view changed drastically after Day 1 and every single week following that Pay-per-view, all the way up to, I believe Elimination Chamber, at Crown Jewel, or whatever the major show in February was. So there was like a six-week window where everything I was told was changing from week to week to week.”
“When you’re trying to do something creatively, you have a vision in your head of how you see it, you’re trying to piece things together to tell the best story you can, and when that consistently gets changed, and the rug keeps getting pulled out from underneath you, or the goalposts keep moving, and then finally the goalposts just get ripped out completely and now you’re looking at the biggest show of the year with possibly nothing on the table or possibly some bastardized version of what could be good, it leaves you very frustrated with the process, and so I was very frustrated with the process. I think that was the timeline, 2022 I want to say. Cody Rhodes coming over, us having the story leading into WrestleMania, having the match, so the last month, like March was solid, pretty good, but everything leading up to that was a very difficult time for me creatively speaking.”
If WWE listened to his concerns:
“I mean, everybody’s listening. I think I’ve gotten to a place where my opinion is valid and people are hearing what I have to say. Now, whether or not that opinion goes into the decision making process is a different story. I’m not privy to a lot of meetings that happen or other conversations with other talent or other executives backstage. So I voiced my concerns to who needs to hear them, but whether or not they take that information and utilize it the way I want them to isn’t up to me, right? It’s not my sandbox. I don’t make those rules. So at the end of the day, I have a job to do. I go out and I’m gonna do it to the best of my ability, but I want to make it the best it can be not just for me, but for this entire show, for the product, for everything. You do your best, but at the end of the day, you have a job to do and you make the best of it and that’s part of any work environment”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit The SI Media Podcast with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
