Seth Rollins: Working With The Bray Wyatt Character Was Difficult

Seth Rollins says that working with the Bray Wyatt character was difficult, but he’d like to get another crack at telling a story with the man behind The Fiend.

Rollins feuded with Wyatt and his alter ego, The Fiend, throughout the fall of 2019. They clashed in a Hell in a Cell match that was critically panned due to the finish, in which the referee called for the match to be stopped. A few weeks later, The Fiend defeated Rollins to win the Universal Championship at WWE Crown Jewel. The two stars subsequently went their separate ways; Rollins eventually morphed into his current persona, while Wyatt was ultimately released by WWE in 2021.

Speaking with Ariel Helwani of BT Sport, Rollins was asked about working with Bray Wyatt and whether he’d like to have a mulligan on it. In response, he noted that “The Fiend” character was difficult to work with because few people, if any, came out of it better than they looked at the start. He stated that he found it challenging to tell a good wrestling story with the character and its supernatural elements.

“Yeah, I mean, another crack at that one might be nice,” Rollins said. “The Bray Wyatt character is just difficult. If you look at anybody that worked with the Bray Wyatt character for an extended period of time, they didn’t come out of it better than they went in. It was very difficult to have a story with him where, aside Randy 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.

“That was the end for the Seth Rollins character as you knew it, the ‘BeastSlayer’ character. So it was tough figuring out how to tell a good wrestling story with that character. I just wasn’t good at it. That was one thing I was not good at, was the phenomenology stuff. I wasn’t able to interweave that with reality enough to make what I felt was a captivating story.”

Looking back on their memorable Hell in a Cell match, Rollins noted that it might have been better if The Fiend “mauled” him so that they could both move on. However, despite their attempts to change Vince McMahon’s mind, the chairman stuck with the plan for their rivalry.

“At the end of the day, it probably would have been better if he just mauled me in that cell and put the claw on me and called it a day,” Rollins said. :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 did not go the way we wanted it to.

“We tried, we tried, and we tried, and the boss at the time would not budge. So we ended up, like I said, it’s not our sandbox. We are actors on a stage sometimes, and we read the lines. 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.

The former Universal Champion emphasized that he’d like to have another chance to work with Windham Rotunda because he believes they could create magic together.

“I would love to have another crack at working with Windham Rotunda,” Rollins said. “He’s an incredible talent, just a mind for the industry and for stories and for characters that is very unique. There’s not a lot of people in our business, past present, or future, that think about things on the level he does. So 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 of reinventing himself. So if our paths cross and he does find his way back here, I would definitely love to have another go around. There’s certainly magic to be made there. In what capacity, I don’t know.”

"The Bray Wyatt character was just difficult.

"I would love to have another crack at working with Windham Rotunda."@WWERollins insists there is magic to be made. Will we ever see it?

? @arielhelwani | #ArielMeets pic.twitter.com/edQKl4Yi4s

— WWE on TNT Sports (@wweontnt) October 2, 2022