Subscribe
Follow Us
Before he was “Freakin'” – a moniker he isn't particularly enthralled with – and before he was the Monday Night Messiah of RAW, Seth Rollins was “The Beast Slayer” of WWE. He was riding high on a series of big victories, including winning a pair of championship victories against Brock Lesnar, and was acting as a hero atop the blue brand. With Roman Reigns gone and The Shield dissolved thanks to a heel turn by Dean Ambrose, Rollins made waves as a galavanting babyface who was a favorite of kids, older fans, and his peers alike.
… and then Rollins met “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt at Clash of Champions, and suddenly, his “Beast Slayer” character was met with a legitimate beast the likes of which he'd never encountered before, and the WWE wasn't particularly fond of besting, at least not until Crown Jewel 2019, when a part-time Bill Goldberg did just that.
Now sure, Rollins ultimately recovered from his loss to Wyatt at Super Showdown 2020, he is Seth “Freakin” Rollins after all, but his babyface run never quite did, and by Christmas of 2019, he was back to playing heel in a variety of new and exciting different ways. Had Rollins, one of the better workers in the company, not been tasked with wrestling the one performer in WWE in 2019 who couldn't be beaten cleanly in a feud, maybe things would have been different. Had he remained in a back and forth with Braun Strowman, or been given a Goldberg of his own, maybe Rollins would still be one of the top babyfaces in WWE, wrestling matches like Cody Rhodes' at Hell in a Cell 2022 instead of against him, but instead, he's been relegated to effectively serve as the company's top character actor, which can be fun, lucrative, and rewarding, but doesn't always result in accolades and trophy case additions.
And yet, when asked if he would wrestle Wyatt again, assuming he is the White Rabbit WWE keeps alluding to, the 14-time WWE champion gave an honest answer that both illuminates how his fateful match with “The Field” ended his babyface run and how he's willing to take another shot at the hardest nut to crack in professional wrestling.
Seth Rollins is willing to take on The White Rabbit if WWE calls on him.
Speaking with Ariel Helwani in the very same interview where he detained how he keeps a chip on his shoulder (more on that here), Rollins detailed his history with Wyatt and suggested that he would be willing to wrestle the oversized baddie again if afforded the opportunity, as transcribed by Fightful.
Article Continues Below
“Yeah, I mean, another crack at that one might be nice,” Seth said. “I mean, look, the Bray Wyatt character is just difficult. If you look at anybody that worked the Bray Wyatt character for an extended period of time They didn't, they didn't come out of it better than they went in. It was very difficult to have a story with him where — aside from Randy [Orton], who obviously killed him, it was difficult for anyone. I think maybe Daniel Bryan Bryan might have escaped a little unscathed. But I mean, everyone else pretty much met a dire end for their character. I mean, that was the end for the Seth Rollins character as you knew it, ‘The Beast Slayer' character. It was tough figuring out how to tell a good wrestling story with that character.”
To Rollins' credit, his assessment was 100 percent correct; unlike, say, The Undertaker, who was the closest thing to “The Fiend” in WWE, the whole point of Wyatt's character was that he wasn't a man but instead something else. Wyatt could be beaten in a match, have promo battles, and even have moments of vulnerability like any performer, babyface or heel, but “The Fiend,” by its very design, was designed more like a slasher villain, than a weekly televised performer who has tag matches against the Alpha Academy or what have you. This all came to a head at the infamous Hell in a Cell match, where Rollins buried his opponent under chairs and a ladder before hitting him with a sledgehammer before the match was labeled a no contest. Had that been that, the match would have gone over like a led balloon, but once it was called off, Wyatt popped up like Michael Myers and attacked Rollins once more, leading to chants of “AEW” and “Refund” from the fans assembled in South Philadelphia.
“I just wasn't good at it. That was one thing I was not I was not good at the phenomenology stuff. I wasn't able to interweave that with reality enough to make what I felt was a captivating story. At the end of the day, it probably would have been better if he just mauled me in that cell, put the claw on me, and call it a day, you know? I could have moved on to something else and he could have had his run as champion. But, that wasn't the case and we played the hand we were dealt, and that was not our call. I know, he would tell you the same thing. That was — that did not go the way we wanted it to. We tried, and we tried, and we tried, and the boss at the time would not budge. So we ended up — like I said before, it's just not our sandbox. We are actors on a stage sometimes and we read the lines. So that was one of those nights where we didn't have the liberty to ad lib. We didn't have the liberty to take things into our own hands.”
So why, after all of that, would Rollins actually want to wrestle Wyatt again?
“I would love to have another crack at working with Windham Rotunda. He's an incredible talent. [He has] a mind for the industry, stories, and for characters that is very unique. There are not a lot of people in our business, past, present, or future that think about things on the level that he does. I would love to have another crack at working with him. Because I think we could do something extremely special. Whether that's with ‘The Fiend' character or not, who knows? He's a master at reinventing himself. So if he does — if our paths cross, and he does find his way back here, I would definitely love to have another go-around. I think we definitely — there's certainly magic to be made there. In what capacity? I don't know.”
