There are a lot of ways to describe Roman Reigns and his current 1,000-plus day reign atop the WWE Universe. He's the “Tribal Chief,” he's the “Head of the Table,” he's a killer in the ring and a performer so ruthless that he'll even give the thumbs down to his own cousin Jimmy before watching as his other cousin nails him with the dreaded Samoan Spike with a thumb of his own.

As for Paul Heyman? He can appreciate all of those descriptors, and he's certainly used a few more of his own too, but the comparison he likes best is a shark, because “The Tribal Chief” is the sort of performer who has to swim relentlessly forward, with little time for self-methodology or nostalgia to get cute with his title reign.

“Roman has the theory of consistency. Consistently great, consistently consistent. If the narrative constantly and consistently progresses and moves forward, then wherever you take it, you're still progressing and moving forward. Here's something, without giving away the secret sauce, we don't let the Roman Reigns character recap. He doesn't talk about what's happened. He brings the stories forward. He talks about what's going to happen. He talks about the emotions that are on the table at the moment. I recap… I bring you up to date. Roman Reigns does not,” Heyman said via Fightful.

“There's no nostalgia to The Tribal Chief. There's no looking back when you're The Tribal Chief. He's a shark. He swims forward, or he dies… That's something we decided very early, and we have never violated it and never will. If we do, and it becomes the exception, then that's a story in and of itself… There's a seismic shift happening here. Same thing when he violates the code of the character. That's a story in and of itself. So it's a constantly shifting narrative because the world is constantly shifting. Or where something happens that resonates, that changes the way people see it, or see the business or see our presentation, and we have to address it. Or there's an emotion that's revealed in the audience that we can expose or tap into or go after, or make people relate to. So we're always looking for that. Always trying to feel that out. Is there something about to happen that we can be one step ahead of, so that when that emotion becomes prevalent, we're already into it?”

You know, for how prolific a pontificator Heyman has a tendency to be – and believe you me, no one is a bigger self-mythologizer than Paul E. Dangerously – his assessment of Reigns' current character is dead on; despite being a member of the WWE's most important multi-generational faction – what with Reigns being The Usos' uncle, not cousin – he really doesn't play too much into the history of his famous family, with the Wild Samoans, Afa and Sika, barely getting a mention on the mic despite their legacy. Whether Cody Rhodes is all about making his legacy right and #CompletingTheStory, Reigns is fully in G.O.D. Mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5v327D8YhY&t=322s

Heyman explains how Roman Reigns took advantage of WWE's crowd-less era.

Elsewhere in his nearly three-and-a-half-hour interview with Rick Rubin, Paul Heyman was asked about the Pandemic era of WWE and what it was like to start the Tribal Chief's storyline without fans in attendance.

For some, having to wrestle, work, and tell stories without a crowd proved incredibly difficult, as they couldn't feed off of the audience, but for Reigns, he was able to thrive by focusing on a new style of storytelling.

“I serve as ‘wise man' for Roman Reigns, for that human being, 100%. But, I learn as much from him every day as he learns for me. I've learned so much being with him. Even when I teach him something, I learn from him. He's brilliant… He looked at pandemic WWE with a digital audience in a manner that no one else did. Everybody else was b**ching. Everybody said, ‘Oh, we're limited. We don't have the crowd. We can't feel who's resonating. We can't feel these new baby faces. Are they over? We don't know if the audience will click with them… The audience isn't there at all.'” Heyman said.

“Oh, he saw this opportunity. [Speaking as Roman] ‘Oh my God, look at the things we can do with this. We can do we can do things in the ring without a microphone. We can have the cameras in there with us because they're not blocking any view. They're not on the hard camera view because we can cut it and we can have the cameras right there in our faces. We can whisper. You can't whisper when there's 22,000 people… When there's no audience, you can whisper, and you can start doing movie scenes. We can bring a sophistication to this product, we can upgrade the product… We can play out storylines that in this soap opera of professional wrestling/sports entertainment is so important. It's the story that's the hook. We can literally draw an audience, attract a crowd to see the next chapter of the story play out and it doesn't even have to be a match anymore. We can completely tilt the axis of what is perceived to be sports entertainment and professional wrestling.”

While you'd be hard-pressed to find a fan who wants to see wrestling go back to its fan-less era, with any empty arena segments since leading to poor reactions from fans online, it's hard to argue that Reigns didn't take serious advantage of the opportunity and create something truly special in the process.