AJ Styles says Roman Reigns did not like him when he arrived in WWE, and that it took their programme together to change it.
Styles talked about it on The AJ Styles Show while going back over his 2016 debut, and was careful to frame it as his own read rather than anything Reigns told him.
“I don’t think Roman liked me in the beginning. I don’t think he really liked me,” Styles said. “He didn’t know who I was or what I was about or know anything about me. It was like, this guy’s coming into my house thinking he knows how to do this.”
He said the working relationship settled it.
“I don’t know that for sure, but I think once we wrestled in that storyline that we had, that was unbelievable. I think after that, he was like, all right, I like this guy,” Styles said. “It wasn’t about me, it was about the match. I think once people realise that with anybody, now you’re able to trust them.”
His summary of where it landed was short. “We can trust this guy. He’s one of the boys,” Styles said.
That phrase is the one that matters in the story. Being one of the boys is the thing a locker room decides rather than management, and Styles is describing the moment it was decided about him, four months into a WWE run that came after fifteen years everywhere else.
He also told a story about greeting Reigns in a corridor at a television taping and getting a response he could not make out, which he put down to his own southern accent as much as anything. It is the kind of detail that gets read as a slight at the time and turns out to be nothing, which is roughly the point he was making about the whole period.
Styles was careful throughout not to present any of it as a grievance. He said twice that he does not know it for a fact, and his account is that the thaw came through working together rather than through anything being talked out.
The context is what made the read plausible. Styles arrived in January 2016 as the most decorated wrestler on the independent circuit and in Japan, with fifteen years of work behind him that WWE audiences had mostly not seen, and he was in the world title picture within four months. Reigns was the man WWE had spent two years pushing as its top babyface and was getting a mixed reaction for it. A newcomer walking straight into that spot is the scenario Styles is describing when he talks about somebody coming into another man’s house.
Styles debuted at the 2016 Royal Rumble in January and was challenging Reigns for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship by that spring, at Payback in May and again at Extreme Rules, before their programme ran into Money in the Bank in June. He won the WWE Championship from Dean Ambrose that September.
The pattern he describes, that the match settles it rather than the conversation, is one he has returned to since moving into talent development. His argument to younger wrestlers has been that the work is what earns trust, and the Reigns story is the version of it he lived.
Ten years on, the two are in different places. Styles retired from the ring at the 2026 Royal Rumble, ten years after his debut; he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in April and now works in talent development, producing matches for NXT and Evolve. Reigns is the World Heavyweight Champion and defends against Penta on the September 14 Raw in Mexico City.
