WWE star Finn Bálor joined Chris Van Vliet on Insight, where he discussed various topics, including whether he realized at the time how significant the “Bullet Club” would become.
Bálor said, “No, not at all. I just wanted to have fun, and originally Bullet Club wasn’t supposed to be Bullet Club, it was supposed to be just me and [Bad Luck] Fale. So I’d been a babyface for six years in New Japan, they wanted to turn me heel, and that was one thing then that made me stay in New Japan. So I was kind of thinking about, ‘Oh, maybe it’s time to try WWE now, I’ve done everything in New Japan that I felt like I could possibly achieve.’ But then the idea came. ‘Hey, would you like to turn heel?’ I was like ‘Oh, this is something new, now I can be a heel in New Japan. I can learn more.’ So that’s kind of what made me stay, and within like two weeks of having the conversation of putting me and Fale together, it was Gedo’s idea, who was the booker at the time, said, ’Hey, you’re always with Karl Anderson, you’re always with Tama. You guys are always together, why don’t we make you guys a group, come up with a name?”
On how he came up with the name:
“So I kind of went to the three guys and said, ‘Hey, do you guys have any ideas for the name?’ They said, ‘Nah, you deal with that, dude. That’s your department.’ So I went home, brainstormed a couple different names, landed on Bullet Club. Once I turned heel, I think it was crazy, because we had so much heat. I remember Fale would be carrying me out on his shoulders at Korakuen Hall, and he kind of had to walk through the crowd, and there’d be fans hitting me in the leg, punching me in the leg, giving me dead legs, and then those fans, so many fans, were calling the office to complain about Prince Devitt cheating to win matches that they had to set up a separate phone line to take complaints. Because there’s so much respect, and I guess it wasn’t something that was done commonly, or at least recently in New Japan. So that was like lightning in a bottle, and it was such a short run for me in Bullet Club, but I look back on it super fondly.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
