During a recent interview with ComicBook.com, 2019 King of the Ring winner Baron Corbin commented on studying his critics, a possible babyface return, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On playing the villain in WWE: “I think it’s the ability to not want to feel cool. You can walk out and want to be a bad guy, play your part, but if you still do cool things, cool moves, give them those moments, it’s hard for people to hate you. I’m really good about studying what irritates people because they complain about so much on social media and I can take those things and how do I amplify it. If they’re going, ‘Oh, Baron Corbin only knows four wrestling moves! He’s the worse ever!’ The next night I might do three, because I know it’s going to irritate them. I’m always looking at what I can do to irritate them. It doesn’t hurt my feelings when people boo me and I’m not concerned about being cool.”
On the fans who claim they hate him: “It’s crazy. All these people claim to hate me and hate everything about me. But they truly obsess over every little detail. And I think that’s part of having that ‘it factor,’ people are just drawn to what you’re doing. They either hate every bit of it or love every bit of it. It’s so funny, when I had long hair they’re like, ‘Aw, he’s losing his hair he needs to shave his head.’ Then [I] shave my head and the exact same fans goes, ‘Aw man, he never should have shaved his head, his hair was great before!’” he added. “It’s just one of those things where they can’t make up their minds over.”
On possibly turning face at some point: “I can’t [imagine it], but I think some of the greatest bad guys become some of the greatest good guys. There’s a lot of guys where it just naturally fits. I think that’s the cool thing about what I have going now is I never force anything. People are hating me, okay, let’s throw gas on that fire. So I think my career has been a very natural in progression. I think that’s what put me at the level I’m at. So when I walk into the arena, every single person in there is booing. People are not sitting on their hands, they’re not looking away, they’re not playing on their phones. They want to see what I do and what they can yell at me about. That takes an extreme amount of work, so I think if it does ever flip it’d be pretty exciting for everybody to switch.”
On protecting his End of Days finisher: “That’s just something I stand by very strongly. I think after three or four years everybody was kind of on board with it. I know Hunter [Triple H] is on board with it, Vince [McMahon] is on board with it. It’s special and we haven’t seen [a kick-out], so let’s keep it that way.”
