IGN: The last time I spoke with you, you hadn’t even cashed in your Money in the Bank case yet to win the World Heavyweight Title. What have the past six months been like for you professionally?
Daniel Bryan: It’s been crazy. It’s been a lot of fun. I went from being a guy who was sparingly being used on television to being the World Heavyweight Champion and the focus of a lot of the storylines on Smackdown. And now I’m in a big match for the WWE Championship on a Pay-Per-View and it’s unreal.
IGN: Those of us who anticipated you becoming a World Champion in the WWE expected you to be having matches with guys like CM Punk. Guys similar to your stature. Did you ever think that your very first championship feuds would be against guys like Big Show and Mark Henry?
Bryan: No, I never thought that if I was going to be the champion in the WWE that those would be my first opponents. My first feuds. Especially because I also felt like I didn’t match up very well with those guys. But then it seems to me that both of those feuds went very well. And I was thrilled to wrestle those guys because it forces me to go outside my usual box. You know, I could go out there and wrestle CM Punk and have a fantastic match, but that’s along my normal line of thinking. Wrestling someone like Big Show requires a totally different style. And for me that was fun.
IGN: How long have you been a vegan?
Bryan: Since December of 2009.
IGN: Did you ever think that being a vegan would draw this much heat from large crowds?
Bryan: No, I didn’t know actually. And I do it for health reasons, you know. Not for entertainment reasons or anything else. So for me it wasn’t even an issue of bringing it up on TV. Other than “Oh, that’s an interesting fact about this guy.” And the idea that you can tell people you’re a vegan and get everyone to go “BOOOO!” is crazy. It’s interesting because the first experience I had with that wasn’t even with the crowd but it was with Vince himself. And Chris Jericho loves telling me this story about how he had gone back to Vince and said “This guy’s good.” It was after the first match I had on TV, and it was against Chris, and he told Vince I was good. “He can get the people behind him,” he said. And Vince said [in Vince voice] “Yeah, but who doesn’t eat steak?” He thought people wouldn’t buy into a guy who didn’t eat steak. And that’s when I kind of realized that there are a lot of people out there who just think it’s completely foreign for me to not eat animals.
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