Roman Reigns appeared on Corey Graves’ After The Bell podcast and here are the highlights.
His new character direction: “This is something I wanted to do. It was an opportunity to be able to connect a lot of dots. It was a bit of a lure as well to get me back in, but for me, I didn’t want to just show up and walk different and talk different. I wanted a whole new presentation and we are going to continue to gradually do that. I thought what better way than to align myself with essentially a high powered attorney. If you take the top athlete in the world and mix him with a head mafia boss character, that’s who I am. The mob boss will go out there and do the hit himself but you have to have somebody dotting the ‘I’s” and crossing the “T’s” for you who understands the ins and outs and can add that new layer to the whole character and the personality.”
Why he took a hiatus from WWE at the start of the pandemic: “A lot of things to be honest, but I think the most defined thought I had was I made a lot of sacrifices on behalf of my family and this is one area that I’m not going to make that sacrifice. I will sacrifice my career. I will sacrifice the performance. Hell, I’ll sacrifice the audience if I have to in order to protect my family. I will quit and hang up the boots. I’ve done everything I could do in this business. There’s isn’t an accolade or a moment that I haven’t had, whether it was a WrestleMania moment all the way to a house show. I’ve experienced everything you could possibly experience. So, it was about putting my family first. If I had to retire and that’s what would be asked of me, I was willing to do it. So for one of the first times in a long time, I put my family first. There was nothing that was going to change my mind. I needed to go away and wait until we were in a better place of understanding of the process knowing exactly what this virus has done and how it’s affected everybody. The way WWE has taken care of me to make me feel safe and make my family feel safe that I’m going out and then coming back in has been huge and critical to get me back in the ring.”
