Roman Reigns brought the big screen to the WWE.
The Tribal Chief teamed with The Rock at WrestleMania. The cousins teamed up to beat Cody Rhodes and Seth Rollins in a huge tag team bout that built up to night two’s main event.
That match sees Reigns defend his Undisputed WWE Universal Championship against Cody Rhodes. This is a rematch from last year, and is one of the biggest matches in years.
Roman Reigns recently spoke with ESPN in the build up to WrestleMania 40. He spoke about the challenges of wrestling during the pandemic era, and how most wrestlers weren’t taking advantages of the changes at the time.
He noticed himself how to use the silence to his advantage, and wanted to bring some cinema to the professional wrestling world for the first time.
“I was asked a question yesterday about coming up and wrestling in front of essentially no one, a small crowd. I told Jimmy [Fallon] on The Tonight Show that I’ve wrestled in front of two people before, literally taking the requests – what do you want to see? You’re the only guy here, so you want a body slam or what? To take on the challenge of the Thunderdome video screens, very similar to this, a very Black Mirror feeling, you have to be different. You have to think outside the box. And one of the advantages I had was I was able to sit back and study the process. I wasn’t working at that time, at the beginning of Covid, I was at home just due to the process and trying to figure out what was going on.”
Roman Reigns Studied The Show To Bring The Big Screen To WWE
Roman Reigns continued, and revealed how he studied the WWE like a football player to realize how to take advantage of the WWE Thunderdome.
“I was able to, like a football player, study film, and I’m watching my colleagues not take advantage of the silence. They’re still wrestling as if we’re in front of thousands of people. And the art form is clearly built for a simultaneous response. But when you don’t have that, you have to change it up. You have to throw a curveball. You have to figure out what other pitches you can throw.”
“So I figured, why not bring the big screen? When it’s my time to get back in there, let’s work on the nuances. Let’s work on the tiny little details because we don’t have to cater to the ecosystem, the atmosphere that we create. Because we never want to not showcase that. We always want to show the craziness that is the WWE universe. But if we don’t have them, how do you stand out? And that’s how I attacked it.”
