Paul Heyman Comments on WWE Smackdown Role with Roman Reigns, The Rock Facing Reigns, Brock Lesnar, More

Paul Heyman’s current role on WWE Smackdown is to be the “Special Counsel” of the “Tribal Chief” Universal Champion Roman Reigns. Heyman has been paired with Brock Lesnar on WWE television for most of the last seven years and a few others (hey CM Punk, how are you doing?). However, now Heyman is with Reigns, who appears to have a different attitude that is more heelish in nature.

Heyman talked to the New York Post about being paired with Reigns along with other subjects. Heyman spoke about how this was a role that Reigns meant to play.

“This version of Roman Reigns needed some experience, adversity, seasoning and age. We were doing the interview on last week’s SmackDown that Roman did behind this fantastic power desk and he delivered an interview regarding Jey Uso and a lesson that Roman learned from his father, who was a WWE Hall of Famer Sika of the Wild Samoans. And I said to Roman, do you realize you could not have presented this facet of your personality even two-and-a-half, three years ago. You were still too young.”

“Now when you look at him and you look at his face, now you see a more mature persona. You can sign off on the fact that he has a decade of experience on a day-to-day basis with enormous main event battles over the past 10 years.”

When asked when the decision was made to put Heyman with Reigns, Heyman said it was being planned for several years.

“This has been in the works for several years and the time was never right to pull the trigger. This was a classic case of all the stars aligning, all the boxes being checked and we all felt this was the perfect time to pull the trigger on something we had thought about for many years.”

The Rock recently mentioned the possibility of facing cousin Reigns in a match and Heyman had an interesting take on that as well.

“Right now there is no one in this industry that is on Roman Reigns’ level and The Rock recognizes it or he would never have been the first person to float the idea (of a match). The Rock floated this idea. Roman Reigns didn’t even have to mention The Rock’s name.”

“It’s clear that the Rock wants it to happen. And The Rock is not the only one, I might add. There’s a line. There is a list of phone calls for Vince McMahon to return of high-profile, WrestleMania, main-event legends that are just aching to get the rub from Roman Reigns at this moment.”

Heyman had a clever answer when asked about Brock Lesnar too.

“If you want to know what Brock Lesnar is going to do next, go by this philosophy: Brock Lesnar does whatever Brock Lesnar wants to do.”

“Brock Lesnar is a dual citizen (Canada and United States) and is not only allowed to both countries, but is welcome in both countries, except by people that he trains with because those poor bastards catch a beating.”

Regarding his run as Raw Executive Director that ended earlier this year, Heyman responded with this.

“My favorite part of being the Raw executive director happened after my time as Raw executive director when Vince McMahon, that chairman of the board, on a quarterly investors call, was asked about Paul Heyman no longer being the Raw executive director and the only comment Vince had was how much he liked the creativity I brought to the job. When someone has been replayed from an executive position that high up in the company and the chairman of the board has nothing but praise, it speaks to the level of satisfaction he had with the job that I had done in an overall sense … and I mean that very sincerely by the way.”

“In a general sense, my favorite part of the job was doing the job. I love working with talent and I love developing talent. I always did. Loved developing talent in an unofficial capacity in WCW, certainly loved it in ECW and built my reputation on it. Working with Brock Lesnar or Ronda Rousey and developing them in this industry and as the Raw executive director, it was a crucial part of my job, a crucial component of my job to develop talent and I loved every single moment of it.”

Heyman covered a lot of other subjects such as comparing Roman Reigns to other athletes early in their careers, he was quick to shut down the “heel” designation for Reigns and plenty of other topics. Check it out in the New York Post website here.