Cody Rhodes Doesn’t Think AEW Fans Understood His Heel Turn

Cody Rhodes left AEW for WWE when his contract ended, and that shocked pro wrestling fans all over. The American Nightmare’s final run in Tony Khan’s company saw Cody work as a heel, but he never officially turned. That, according to Rhodes, was the entire meaning behind his run as a bad guy.

Cody Rhodes was getting tremendous boos during the end of his time in AEW. His character didn’t shift much, but that heel turn was there. As Cody Rhodes put it, the whole thing might have been a bit too “nuanced” for AEW fans.

 Ariel Helwani of BT Sport provided Cody Rhodes with a chance to expand on this subject, and The American Nightmare was quite candid. It seems that his actual heel turn in AEW would have given fans something that they wanted, and that would have been a heel thing to do in the first place.

“I definitely prefer being on the light side of things and being on the good guy realm. I also, I think if you’re going to be a bad guy today, you have to really be a bad guy.”

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“I’ll give you an example, the number one thing a heel is supposed to do is take something away. The crowd wants to see something, they’re stomping their feet and clapping their hands, you take it away. You have to know when to give it to them if you take it away. The last heel run that I had, the number one thing they wanted me to do was turn heel. The number one thing I could do was say, ‘I’m never going to turn heel,’ which makes me a heel. If people need further proof that this wasn’t some revisionist history, look at the matches I was having, I’m bumping and feeding. Yeah, we throw the weight belt into the crowd and it gets thrown back. Then we do a dogpile spot 30 seconds later. Those aren’t things that you just do on the fly.

Maybe it was a bit too nuanced for any audience and maybe it was a scenario where I just swing and miss, you never know, because I think people thought I was adamant about not turning and that’s not a real thing. You have to go with what they give you. I had two years of wonderful babyface hoorah and that was a nice way to go there at the end. Here [in WWE] though, I don’t love the idea of being a heel here. Something could present itself and what you put out there is. I haven’t thought about it at all. It’s different, because I mention this younger audience, if they believe, I have to stick to that more than a smaller section of the audience.”

Cody Rhodes returned to WWE as a massive babyface. He also wants to finish his story. Only time will tell if a heel turn is included in that, but he is certainly the good guy in his storyline with Roman Reigns.

What’s your take on Cody’s opinion about the end of his AEW run? Did you understand his heel turn? Sound off in the comments!