Cody Rhodes says he pitched signing his soul over to Simone Johnson rather than her father, and that he never told The Rock about it.
Rhodes brought the idea up with Johnson on What Do You Wanna Talk About. He said he had mentioned it to two friends in WWE creative and no one else.
“When he asked me for my soul, I thought, you know what would have been funny is to relent and give my soul, but not to him,” Rhodes said. “And this is at the time when you were the NXT general manager, to you. And I thought, that’s got legs.”
He described how it would have worked. “I’ll never say a word again. She’ll speak.”
Johnson, who was NXT’s on-screen General Manager under the name Ava at the time, had not heard the pitch until Rhodes raised it. “I think we would have crushed that,” she said. “I would have loved to have done that.”
Asked how her father would have reacted, Johnson said, “I think he would have been all for it. Absolutely.”
Rhodes said he never brought it to The Rock because of how much was already going on in the angle. Johnson said she did not know the soul promo was coming at all.
“I don’t think I knew he was coming back that day,” Johnson said. “Like I had no context of what the promo would be, and then I just saw it and I was like, soul is crazy.”
Rhodes agreed. “Soul was a lot.”
Neither ruled it out entirely. “Maybe it could still happen,” Johnson said. Rhodes replied, “Definitely never say never.”
Johnson on the Vengeance Day reaction
Later in the same conversation, Johnson discussed the fallout from the same stretch of programming, saying it was the first time she had talked about it publicly.
The Rock returned on the February 2, 2024 SmackDown and shook hands with Rhodes, taking the WrestleMania 40 match with Roman Reigns that fans had expected Rhodes to have. The reaction was immediate and hostile. Two days later, WWE ran Vengeance Day, and Johnson was scheduled to appear in a taped promo.
“I was sitting in makeup,” Johnson said. “I’d finished my makeup, and our head writer Johnny Russo came up to me, and he was like, ‘Hey, can I just talk to you for a minute?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like when we play your promo, please don’t be surprised if they boo you.’ And I was like, okay, like yeah, like I can understand that. And then that did happen.”
“I remember NXT posting about it was like I think a shot of him walking to the ring, and like every single comment was just ‘We Want Cody,'” Johnson said. “And it was for the whole duration of the show, every match that was on that show that night.”
Johnson said the night reset how she understood the audience. “That day, it changed the way that I looked at, I think, fans overall, and it just changed the way that I looked at the wrestling business. And for a while, I thought about it in a very negative way.”
She said her view of it has shifted since. “But then I think, in a way, I’m incredibly grateful that that happened, because it made me much more confident in what I was doing and why I was doing it. And it made me just be like, all these external factors can happen, and everyone can have an opinion because of like who I am, or something that my dad has done, or blah blah blah. But I was like, I need to. It made me be a little bit selfish in my journey and what I was doing, but I think it was necessary.”
Rhodes said he contacted her that day. Johnson confirmed it. “You asked me if I was okay, and then you asked if it was anything you could do.”
Rhodes described where his own head was during the “We Want Cody” period. “When you see the ‘We Want Cody’ thing trending, and then it goes, it permeates beyond just a normal, it’s big. That was a nice feeling, but it wasn’t. It had hit so hard a few days before that I wasn’t there to receive it in any way. I didn’t want to signal boost it. I just didn’t want to touch it.”
The Rock stepped aside within days. Rhodes went on to face Reigns at WrestleMania 40 and won the Undisputed WWE Championship. The soul storyline continued through the spring.
Johnson left WWE in January. She now works as a junior executive at Seven Bucks Productions.
