WWE superstar and current tag champion Sami Zayn recently appeared on the After The Bell podcast to discuss a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on the epic Bloodline storyline that has been told in WWE for almost two years. Check out his thoughts on the subject below.
His response to people comparing The Bloodline storyline to cinema:
Even if I were to say something like that, it could come off arrogant or biased, but I have every metric available to us backing up that sentiment. Numbers ranging from social media engagement, viewership, live attendance, merchandise, and just in general. The amount I’ve been bombarded on the streets, before the storyline and after the storyline, the amount of people who told me, ‘I kind of fell out of love with the product for a while, I stopped watching, this storyline brought me back in.’ That’s one of the most rewarding things you could possibly hear from a fan. I do think we stumbled upon something kind of magical, lightning in a bottle, the fact that we were able to draw it out for over a year, and it’s still going on, it’s next evolution, it’s me speculating, but the only thing I can liken it to is my story with Kevin, which is a 20-year story.
How his story with Owens began years ago on the indie circuit:
Year one of me and Kevin, after we started taking our match all over the country, all over the independent circuit, we were like, ‘People are going to get fed up with this. When are they going to get fed up with this?’ We’ve had to work so hard to where, not only do they never get fed up with it, they always wanted to see what is next. I used to think it was nothing, I think it was just this weird, magical chemistry that we had that kept people engaged, but it took a lot of hard work when I stopped and thought about it, which almost borders on neurosis from people watching from the sidelines. You’d see us at work, and you’d see us bicker over trying to make these things as good as possible, ‘it’s a match, a storyline,’ and I can’t tell you how many times, dating back 15 years, people would go, ‘Don’t you guys have this figured out by now?’ It took me 10 or 15 years for me to realize, ‘No, that’s why it keeps working, because we don’t have it figured out,’ we never assume it’s figured out, we always have to reinvent and top it to make it fresh, and how do we do that? Putting that level of energy into it is what kept it that way. If we just said, ‘You want to do what we did in Pittsburgh? Cool.’ They already saw it in Pittsburgh, and you’re tired of it by the time you see it three times. It was constantly about keeping it innovative and fresh. We got 20 years out of that and counting.
How The Bloodline storyline compares with his decades long story with Owens:
In some ways, I think the evolution of the story, and this is me speculating, while I think the Sami and Kevin side has kind of put a bow on it, we got the revenge on Roman, and now we’ve seen the Bloodline crumble, or at least appear to splinter, I do think it could be one of those things that is so magical, like Kevin and Sami, the key to it could be going apart, and coming back together, going apart, coming back together, to where it could actually be, if you do it successfully, could be woven in a way for another three, four years, but you do it in a way that is conscientious to where you’re not burning fans out on it, where they’re actually excited to see the next stage of it.
When the Zayn/Owens relationship got compared to Undertaker/Kane Zayn had this to say:
The thing that made this different from Kane and Undertaker is, imagine a Kane and Undertaker level depth of relationship with the longevity, coupled with a story as compelling on a weekly basis as perhaps Austin and McMahon. In some ways, they are kind of apples and oranges, but we did it in a very different way. I don’t want to say cinematic, but we did have that mindset. Everybody involved had a cinematic approach to it versus a ‘rasslin’ approach to it. We tried to get out of the box and were thinking more in terms of Breaking Bad and The Wire, and these complex characters interacting versus trying to mirror what the NWO did or what Austin and McMahon did. There is so much to it.
Says nothing touches wrestling when it’s at its best:
I dare say, when [wrestling is] done at it’s absolute best, nothing touches it, including great cinema, great television, great theater, great musical performance. It’s all of those things rolled into one.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)