During a recent interview with The Mirror, Dolph Ziggler commented on teaming up with Robert Roode, the original WWE NXT roster, and lots more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On where his team with Robert Roode ranks in his personal tag team history: “We’re really just getting going. So I can’t say we’re the greatest of all time because we’ve only really had a couple of weeks of working together. It’s a weird thing, I don’t have tons of people that I text with on a regular basis, or I’m in a group chat with. But over the course of the last 14 years, people that have been trying every possible outlet to be successful in the business, I’ve somewhat gravitated towards. Whether they’re doing something on the outside, whether they’re doing everything they can to be great in WWE. Whether it’s someone like The Miz, or Zack Ryder, and those are two prime examples over the past few years, constantly doing projects outside to make themselves better and more important for the show, hoping to get a break on the show. When Bobby Roode shows up from NXT, of course he fought me(!) because that’s what you do when you show up from NXT, which I get. But immediately I recognised, he understands our style and what’s happening, he’s really smart and has a brain for this, I think this is going to be a blast, and it was. We became friends and started texting, and there’s only a handful of those people that on a regular basis I text.” It’s because they are so good and constantly trying to get better. So the fact that we became a team, it wasn’t like ‘here’s what’s going to happen, the seed is going to be planted and in six months you guys are going to be a team’, that doesn’t happen too often in WWE. We were thrown together and told ‘you two are two of the best, we’re putting you together to make this entire division better’ and I went ‘say no more, we got it’. We haven’t done a ton of stuff but the few things we have, whether it’s turmoil tournaments or different things, it’s pretty great to know someone next to you isn’t just thinking ‘I’m on a team with Dolph, so I can hang out and do whatever’. Bob’s doing his own thing but when we team up and work together, we both know how the match should be, we both have that same psychology and years of experience and we’re like ‘no no no, we got this, just listen to us and you’re going to come out looking great’.”
On mimicking superstar entrances and if there was any he wanted to do but couldn’t: “It’s hard to say because for the longest time I’ve been a wrestling fan above everything. I’ve watched the old tapes, but at the time, I really didn’t want to be doing it because I didn’t feel like we were surprising anyone. We’d have me come out and say ‘now I’m gonna trick you’ and then I would go back and come out again. So, I think the whole point of that would be to, anytime during the two-three hour show, hear The Undertaker’s music and think ‘Well, he’s not supposed to be here! Oh, it’s Dolph’ and I’d say ‘You idiots have based your whole life on an entrance theme that’s on you, you should be enjoying… and so on…’ That’s what I thought. I didn’t understand it and I fought against it a little bit and they told me ‘No’. So I didn’t really love doing that because I knew we weren’t getting that part of the ‘up’ into the ‘down’, the ‘now they’re mad at me!’ So it was like ‘Urgh, what are you doing?’. So, had we done that to the proper trolling heights that we should have, it would have been fun. Doing someone else’s entrance is fun to screw with fans or to prove a point, but I’m passed the point where I’m like ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I came out as Triple H, gee that would be cool’. No, I’m someone who has wanted to make their own mark for about 12 years in a row now, so I have no interest in going ‘wouldn’t that be neat’. Perhaps someone new and young, perhaps that could be a dream of theirs.”
On the difference between stand-up comedy and wrestling: “It’s really interesting. Of course, if you’re doing a TV production, you’ve got to know where the cameras are, your marks, you have to know the blocking of everything. That’s another thing with Bobby Roode and myself, we know what to do and where we need to be and people will listen to and follow us. When it comes to a comedy show, a lot of times it’s 300 people packed into a room. You get to play around with them and do some improv and to talk to somebody. With WWE if we’re doing a TV show there’s, say, 10,000 people there. Behind the camera, there’s millions watching and you have to play to them. So, it’s interesting. You can still connect with someone. Something I heard Eddie Guerrero did a long time ago was find someone, when you’re getting beat down or beating someone down, and lock eyes, and use them to be like ‘help me!’ or ‘this is because of you!’, either way. They think they’re in it in the TV, they’re with it for real, so you can use that and focus on the TV screen. The improv can be handy too. People get hurt; things go wrong. Things go from 15 minutes to 90 seconds to get something done and it’s like, okay, go. You have to be able to improv and that’s something I excel at in WWE and in comedy.”
On if he looks at the NXT invasion fondly as something he helped build: “I don’t look at it that way at all. It was a much different NXT. It would have become this thing without me anyway. It was fun to be on that show and what is that, eight years ago!? I don’t even know. But for the WWE to have the confidence in me to go and train someone else, to be a part of this new show, constantly be talking and doing things, it shows where a bunch of us stood with WWE. I mean it’s such a different animal now, they’re their own brand, a unique thing because they have their own stars. It was cool to be there at the beginning though.”
On his longevity in the business: “A lot of it is luck because injuries, no matter how good you are, can put you on the sidelines. No matter how good you or your opponent are, you can step on the mat wrong and tear your ACL. So a couple of those add up, and they don’t trust you anymore and you can’t do certain things. But also being able to adjust at all times and being ready to go whether you’re being a glorified enhancer talent or someone that’s told ‘we’re going to revamp the entire tag-team division, starting today, with you and this tag partner that you’ve never wrestled with, and you’re going to do 45 minutes tonight and it’s going to go on and on, go!’ and you can do it and not have them go ‘he wasn’t really ready for that’. You’re always prepared for any possible role. I can talk on TV, I can make it funny, I can do a behind the scenes interview on the fly, I can go talk to investors, to kids, to an anti-bullying rally. You can do all those things, something Miz has made an entire career out of, I can do that, plus the good wrestling.”
