After being firmly stuck in the WWE mid-card for years – literally – following his brutal shoulder injury at SummerSlam in 2016, having to vacate his Universal Championship the next day to Seth Rollins on RAW, Finn Balor is back to doing what he does best: working heel.

The unofficial leader of The Judgment Day who parlayed a feud against Edge into a whole new lease on life as his replacement, Balor now finds himself mere hours away from getting another crack at Rollins' title, with the WWE World Heavyweight Championship officially being contested at Money in the Bank near his familial home in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland.

Sitting down for an interview with After The Bell with Corey Graves and Kevin Patrick just before his match in front of some 18,000 fans at the O2 Arena in London, Balor noted just how “reinvigorated” he feels to be working heel once more, as the decision to work face for much of his WWE career was a choice of creative, not a sign of his preferences.

“I feel like it’s reinvigorated me on a personal level. I don’t really wanna speak too much from a professional level, I haven’t really completed that stage of the journey yet. I feel personally that I’m back enjoying my work, I feel refreshed. I feel invigorated. I feel creative again, and it’s something that I haven’t really had the chance to fully explore this type of character on Raw or SmackDown. It’s something I wanted to really do on a second run in NXT, but when we lost interaction with the crowd, we kinda had to tweak and adjust course to change the character because of no audience in the arena. This is the version of the ‘Prince' that I wanted to deliver in NXT three years ago,” Balor said via Fightful.

“This has been the goal since I’ve first put on a pair of wrestling boots. I was born to be a heel, and when I started this at eighteen years old, I was a heel for years upon years. It wasn’t till I came to NXT during my first run, that I started to learn or taught how to be a babyface, and it was something that was very much a WWE directive, that’s how they saw me. That’s not really how I see myself, so it’s been very much an exploratory couple months for me, kinda getting back to what I feel I do best, or at least what makes me happiest in the ring. I don’t know if it’s what I do best, but it’s what I enjoy the most. I’ve really thrived personally in the last couple of months as well.”

After establishing himself as one of the most important heels in New Japan Pro Wrestling history, WWE's decision to make Prince Devitt into Finn Balor was always a head-scratching one for long-time fans of his in-ring work. Though this current character isn't the same man who founded the Bullet Club, it's easily the most compelling work he's done in WWE in ages, which makes his personal appreciation for the role all the more appreciatable.

Finn Balor weighs in on the “ridiculous” nature of the “Demon.”

Elsewhere in his appearance on After The Bell, Finn Balor was asked about his “Demon” character, which seemingly comes and goes from WWE with little rhyme or reason.

Though Balor, again, was game to try what creative presented him, as the character does have roots in his bodypaint from NJPW, he doesn't think the gimmick quite worked out how some may have hopped.

“It became a crutch. I’ll hold my hand up and say I’m guilty of trying to please too many people and not please myself. The thing with that character, or even a lot of the stuff that I was doing in WWE in general, was a result of trying to please too many people, be it the creative team, the writing team, the merchandise team, the promotions team, the tickets team and not really pleasing myself,” Balor said via TJR.

“When the demon character was conceived in Japan, it was something that didn’t really have a rhyme or reason, but it was just something that I felt I could express myself and mold myself better in the moment when I needed to go into that zone. When you bring it into the WWE Universe, it has to become something or it has to have a reason why this happens, why this transformation happens, and I feel like the more you try and explain something, the less sense that actually makes and the more ridiculous it becomes.

“For me, that was the crutch that I felt. It wasn’t necessarily the process of the paint or the creative part of trying to execute a different unique design every time, it was to try to keep so many people happy and not really staying true to myself and why I was doing it in the first place.”

Has the WWE Universe seen the last of the “Demon?” No, probably not; after seemingly being killed off out of embarrassment in his match against Roman Reigns at Extreme Rules 2021, Balor brought the gimmick back at WrestleMania 39, and while it didn't prevent him from getting over a dozen staples in his head after the match, it did get a good reaction from the crowd regardless. Still, if Balor decides he wants to sink or swim on his own merits, it looks like The Judgment Day has teed him up to do just that.