During an appearance on the In The Kliq podcast, Bryan Danielson confirmed that there were talks of WWE allowing him to work in Japan if he signed a new deal with the company:
“Well so I don’t know how far along the talks went but, and I don’t know even if I was the start of them for sure but one of the things when I was talking to them when they were — when WWE was trying to re-sign me was I said I wanna be able to go work in Japan and so they were trying to come up with an agreement to where I would be able to go and do that and that sort of thing and so yeah, that was definitely something that was talked about. I don’t know where it went or anything like that. All I know is that now it seems like AEW has a really great relationship with New Japan. So I feel like it couldn’t have gone that well [Bryan laughed].”
“I love smash mouth wrestling and that’s what I wanna do in AEW, you know what I mean? For years in WWE, I was portrayed as the underdog and they wanted me to wrestle kind of a certain style and that sort of thing but now, I can just kind of do what I’d like to do and wrestle with a certain — a higher degree of physicality and I think that scares some people. But you know, that’s one of the things that I enjoy about wrestling the most is the physicality of it, you know what I mean? And so, that’s something that I really enjoy.”
