Sami Zayn joined Corey Graves on WWE After The Bell covering all things pro wrestling. During the discussion, Zayn talked about his insane match with Johnny Knoxville at WWE WrestleMania 38 earlier this year, in which they used various weapons including a giant mouse trap.
“There’s not really a match like that anywhere else because there’s only one Johnny Knoxville and one Sami Zayn and one WrestleMania where those things could exist. You can’t recreate that match. You just can’t recreate that now. Like for example, you could watch Undertaker-Shawn, and you could be two guys on the independents and you can do your little version of that match. You can’t redo the version of this match because it doesn’t exist. There’s no other giant hand.”
“I can’t build my Hell in a Cell match with Seth Rollins, for example, by flying his phone number over Los Angeles. We got to go so far out of the box. I got kind of addicted to it. I was like, oh, man, here’s all these things we can do next. and there’s just so much awesome stuff that we could do like him giving out my phone number, and me taking all those calls. I think that’s going to be very, very memorable.”
“One of the big things was the red carpet premiere at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood going to the movie premiere. That was such an awesome moment for me. I’ve never done anything like that before. It was like my Andy Kaufman moment with Dave Letterman. The thing that I find funny is, in this case, I was Andy Kaufman and the wrestler.”
“But it just got me so addicted to transitioning from good match guy to storytelling guy or whatever it is. This was a bit of a light bulb moment like, oh, man, there’s so many creative ways I want to do things and I hope I can do them. It’s kind of hard sometimes here with the nature of how we do things. But it just got me so excited about the out of the box ways to build a story or tell a story, and things to do, and ways to build your character and all this fun stuff.”
“I couldn’t have done it with anyone else except Johnny Knoxville, because he’s not a conventional wrestler. He’s not even a conventional celebrity. Like if I was wrestling Leonardo DiCaprio, we wouldn’t be doing this stuff. It’s because that’s what Johnny Knoxville does. He does gags and goofs, and he gets it this way, that way, whatever. So it could only have worked with him. So that was another thing that was a big takeaway for me is the creative way we can go about telling stories and getting character stuff over and doing things that we don’t always do. It remains to be seen how much of that I get to do going forward.”
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(H/T to wrestlingnews.co for quotes)
