WWE Superstar Finn Balor was a recent guest on Mark Andrews’ “Love Letter To Wrestling” podcast, airing on the BBC Radio Wales Network. Balor talked about wanting to turn heel, backstage politics and much more.
Balor said that he would like to be a heel on Raw/SmackDown, which he has yet to do: “I really, really want to work on the heel aspect of Finn, at like RAW/SmackDown level, because I have kind of done it in Japan, we tried to do it in NXT, but it kind of went a different direction. And I would really love to have a real heel run.”
Before his NXT run in 2019-2021, Balor was frustrated with the backstage politics and he thinks his prime has yet to come: “I think it’s yet to come, I feel like I had got a bit stale and I was kind of like, I was just tired, I was exhausted. I was kind of just worn out of dealing with the politics in the office and the writers and everything that goes with it. I just like, had enough. When I returned to NXT, I really feel like that rejuvenated me in the ring. One thing I feel that helped and you know all the negative effects of the pandemic, taking the fans out of the equation in wrestling makes you kind of change the cadence and the tempo of the match. Because you’re not trying to perform for a large audience, you’re literally performing in a one-on-one environment, and you can really work more on the details of the match. You’re not so reliant on hearing that audible response from the crowd.”
One positive side of wrestling without a crowd was that Balor was able to wrestle in a way that appeases more, without having to seek the perfect crowd reaction: “You know, so I would produce a match to get a ‘yay’ or a ‘boo’ or a ‘oh, holy s**t.’ When you take that element out of it you can get back to the nuts and bolts of what I actually learned in Hammerlock, and what I learned in Japan, and just gritty wrestling. I really feel that despite all the negative things that the pandemic brought us, it brought me that one positive thing that I can get back to wrestling for me and the way I like to wrestle. It’s now kind of finding that balance of how can I keep that art form of the way I like to wrestle in front of big crowds when you’re on a limited time frame with TV wrestling? So it’s trying to find that balance is going to be the most difficult thing.”
