Sami Zayn’s recent change in attitude wasn’t something WWE just decided to flip on overnight. He’d actually been working toward it for months, and one major loss convinced him that the version of Sami everyone knew had pretty much run its course.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Zayn was asked about the strange spot his character has been in lately. He’s clearly been acting more like a heel, but crowds haven’t always treated him like one, with cheers and boos following him depending on the night.
That was actually part of the plan. Zayn said he never wanted the usual wrestling heel turn where somebody suddenly decides they’re a bad guy. He wanted fans to slowly start changing how they felt about him.
It all really started after Zayn lost to Drew McIntyre at the Royal Rumble. At that point, he felt like WWE couldn’t keep going back to the same story of Sami Zayn being the lovable underdog desperately chasing his first world championship.
“Yeah, I think it’s kind of — I don’t know when this is going to air, but today’s date is what? October 6th? Seventh? Yeah, October 7th. Okay, so it’ll probably air within two weeks. I’m only saying that because it really sometimes does evolve week to week. There’s a lot of evolution that’s happened, and part of what I’ve liked about this sort of turn is that it wasn’t done as a conventional turn. It wasn’t done, ‘Good guy, good guy, good guy, now I’m bad.’ You know what I mean? It was just a very gradual process, and it all started when I lost to Drew at the Royal Rumble. I realized, well, we’ve played this card. Can’t play it again. So something needs to change now.”
Sami Zayn wanted to take his time with it. Instead of forcing the crowd to hate him, he planned on gently pushing them in that direction and seeing how they reacted along the way.
“And I’d like it to be gradual, and I’d like to just feel the audience. I’d like to obviously nudge the audience in a certain direction, but I want to do it in this sort of delicate way. And there were things that, again, unexpected gifts that fall from the sky, or just hands that you’re dealt that you don’t know are going to be dealt, that sometimes put us on a fast track one way or took us in a different direction another way.”
Zayn even had a rough idea of where he wanted the crowd split to be. At the beginning, he estimated around 90 percent of the audience was still cheering him, and he wanted to slowly chip away at that instead of immediately turning everyone against him.
“So, for example, when I beat Carmelo Hayes for the title, it went from like 80-20 cheers. It went from like 90-10. I had 10 to work with in the beginning, and I’d like to get that number to like 70-30, maybe 60-40. So 90% cheers in January or whatever. Just enough to hear one or two guys going, ‘Boo.’ Like, okay, perfect. I can work with that, and I’ll just gently tip those scales.”
Weekly television had other ideas, though. Zayn said there were points where he couldn’t get the exact crowd reaction he wanted, so he basically had to roll with whatever came his way.
“There was this fine balancing point that I wanted to get to, and I couldn’t get to it when I wanted to get to it because that’s just weekly television, and that’s the hand you’re dealt sometimes. So a lot of it is just, as I said, rolling with the punches, being in the pocket, being present and dealing with it and all that kind of stuff.”
Then Carmelo Hayes happened. Zayn said beating Hayes for the United States Championship completely changed the crowd reaction almost overnight. He had been slowly getting closer to the reaction he wanted, but after that victory, the balance suddenly swung heavily against him. His issues with Trick Williams were helping things along too.
“But then when I beat Carmelo Hayes, overnight I had probably — I was at like 70-30 at that point — and then it just went 90-10 in the other way as soon as I beat him. And the stuff with Trick was all contributing to it at that time as well. But then when I beat Carmelo, it was like a light switch.”
That meant Zayn suddenly had to speed things up. Instead of fighting the reaction, he decided to work with it while still making sure his character felt like the same person gradually changing rather than someone who woke up one morning as a completely different guy.
“So, okay, that’s going to accelerate the process a little bit. But for me, it’s important to just have — I didn’t want to take this character and go, ‘Well, now I’m a bad guy,’ crumple it up and do something else. I really like evolving into things. You know what I mean? And if you look at the trajectory of the character, if you go back starting in, I don’t know, 2019 maybe, each little chapter has kind of seamlessly bled into the next thing.”
The Drew McIntyre loss was such a big deal because Zayn had already started wondering whether his chance to tell the classic underdog story had passed him by. After getting so close during the Bloodline storyline and its aftermath, he eventually had to accept that WWE couldn’t keep asking fans to invest in the same chase forever.
“Even at the start of this year, which was nine months ago, ten months ago now, whatever, and I was wrestling Drew and I didn’t win, I had kind of had to just battle with it and just go like, you know what? Maybe the ship sailed. I was real close a couple of years ago with all the Bloodline stuff and all that, and even in the fallout of that. And then I was close.”
For Zayn, losing to McIntyre effectively killed off the idea of simply trying the same Cinderella story one more time. He felt fans had already been asked to believe in that journey enough times.
“But after losing that match, I was like, well, you can’t tell this story again. Maybe it’ll happen in some different way, and it did happen in a bit of a different way. But the story of the Cinderella story, underdog who finally wins the big one, we burnt that card. That card was done after losing to Drew because you can only tell that story so many times.”
The Undisputed WWE Champion also admitted that accepting it wasn’t particularly easy. There was a point where Zayn genuinely wondered whether his best opportunity to become world champion had simply passed.
“You can get them on board once, twice, three times. Like, all right. You know what I mean? And it just wasn’t the right time. I didn’t have the momentum that I had a year or two prior to that. So I had to kind of struggle to accept that maybe I just missed the window, slipped through the cracks, and it just won’t happen.”
Instead of trying to recreate the momentum he had during the Bloodline days, Zayn decided his character needed to go somewhere new. The funny part is that he wanted that transformation to happen slowly, only for Hayes and Williams to help fans turn on him a whole lot faster than he expected.
Where do you want to see Sami Zayn take his character from here now that he’s moving away from the lovable underdog role? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
