WWE Superstar Sami Zayn recently joined Edge and Christian on their official podcast, E&C’s Pod Of Awesomeness for an in-depth interview. Below are some of the highlights.
On Vince McMahon being a genius and his thoughts on Zayn’s heel character: “Vince’s vision is super-different and I kind of get when people call him a ‘genius’, I kind of get it in a sense because call it ‘genius’ or call it whatever you want, but there’s no debating that his mind works different than everybody else’s does, so everybody else will see things one way and he’ll see it one completely different way. So his vision for me as a heel was completely different from how I viewed it, but as soon as I did it for the first week or the second week, and now I’ve gotten a couple of house shows under my belt, I’m like, ‘oh, man. He’s so right!’ He’s right.”
On his interactions with Vince about his character: “My interactions with Vince have been a little bit more limited because I haven’t been involved in as many prominent storylines, so now, this is something that I feel he sunk his teeth into and just getting to pick his brain a tiny bit about how he views the character. But he didn’t even get into detail. Like, some of it was just, he would just say, ‘smile out there.’ I go, ‘really? Smile?’ He goes, ‘big smile out there.’ And then, I’d do it and I’m like, ‘oh, man! Of course! Like, it’s so much more heat than going out there and scowling and being like, ‘you guys all did me wrong!'” Zayn explained, “if you’re smiling, it’s just so much more obnoxious and so much more dislikable. And, again, it’s just such a simple thing and you start to see it. Once you execute it and it works, that’s like another little lightbulb that goes off in your head.”
On how he would sum up his heel character: “I’ll try to sum [the character] up as easily as I can. The analogy that I would give is it’s almost like when you’re dating a girl and she kind of has these quirks, but they’re lovable. But once you break up, it’s like, ‘oh, God! She was so annoying! She would always hog the blankets, she always wanted the room at 65 degrees,’ or whatever. Do you know what I mean? Like, the things you used to love about her, now, you hate about her because you don’t love her anymore. So it’s almost to me, that’s where I’m at right now. It’s like, the character isn’t all-of-a-sudden dying his hair black and wearing eyeliner or something like that. It’s just he’s the same kind of he, now it just means something different because his intentions are different.
“I was spinning my wheels, but now you can get mileage out of the fact that you were spinning your wheels. It’s more motivation, so nothing goes in the garbage. Everything goes to… you almost need to keep inventory of what you did because you can bring it back around any time to get mileage out of it.” Zayn continued, “it’s just cool to be challenged because I was spinning my wheels. I was.”
Check out the complete episode of E&C’s Pod Of Awesomeness featuring the Sami Zayn interview at Art19.com.