WWE RAW Superstar
Seth Rollins recently spoke with Graham Matthews of Bleacher Report and talked about keeping in contact with his former partners in The Shield -
Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose, now known as
AEW World Champion Jon Moxley.
Rollins noted that he and Moxley are still on speaking terms, despite his comments on Moxley's
WWE departure last year, which rubbed some people the wrong way.
"We still talk from time to time," Rollins said of Moxley. "I would love to see what he's doing or how he's doing or whatever. When his wife [Renee Young] got sick, obviously I checked in on him to make sure he was doing OK and the dogs were good and all that good stuff."
Regarding Reigns, who has been off WWE TV during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rollins commented on Reigns' busy home life and how he appears to be in the best shape of his life.
"He's got five kids now. He's a busy dude," Rollins said of Reigns. "It's not that he's sitting at home taking his time off. He's working in a different way. As expected-father-to-be later this year, I can't imagine having five little crazies running around at once, so kudos to him and his wife for what they're doing. But he's doing good and he's healthy. You see him on social media. He's working out, he looks like he's in the best shape he's ever been."
Rollins is currently working as "The Monday Night Messiah" on the RAW brand, and will face
Dominik Mysterio in a Street Fight at WWE
SummerSlam on Sunday. He feels like this current character might be his best, noting that he's only getting started with the direction of the character.
"It's only really been in earnest for six months, seven months or so now, and so I'm just starting to dig my fingers into it and mold it into what I want it to be," Rollins said. "It's been a blast. It's been different for me, a different role for me than I've played in the past as well. Not just in the ring, but behind the scenes. Time will tell where it ranks, but I'm having a lot of fun with it."
He continued and addressed the fan criticism of the gimmick, adding that he's embraced the boos, seeing them as a blessing in disguise.
"You can go back and talk about, 'We should have done this, we should have done that,' but at the end of the day, it's going to happen the way it happened," Rollins said. "There was a ton of extenuating circumstances for why I think I was so hot a year before as a babyface and it kind of slowly fizzled out and turned out the way it did. It made for a great character arc and my entire career has been one giant character arc. I'm looking forward to what the next phase is and where this one takes us."
Rollins has openly defended the WWE product in the past few years. While he believes that longterm storytelling is something WWE has excelled at this year, he admits that there is plenty of room for improvement on both RAW and SmackDown in terms of creative.
"There's always stuff to work on and, gosh, I think it's so hard to pinpoint one thing or two things really," Rollins said. "I think things are tough creatively right now in the sense that we don't know where this whole thing is going to fall and we're in the Performance Center, so we're doing the best we can as far as what the aesthetic looks like, trying to get a crowd in there to make noise.
"Things from a viewers' perspective aren't quite the same. If we could somehow, if we're going under the pretense we don't know when live events are coming back and when a live audience is going to be in something the size of a sold-out Boston Garden or whatever, I think making it more fan-friendly, making it more aesthetically pleasing to an audience of a television show might go a long way."
Rollins said he's looking to improve the WWE product any way he can, reiterating that change is a constant process. He also admitted that there are so many things everyone needs to work on every day, and that everything in WWE could be better.
"That's just pulling a rabbit out of a hat because there's so many things we all need to work on every day," Rollins said. "Not just the company, but myself, the talent around me, everyone in the back, the writers, the consistency, the conversations, the communication, everything could be better.
"It's so hard to pick just one thing and say, 'Ah, that's going to be the ticket, that's going to do it.' It's a work in progress, and I think going out there and consistently doing your job the best you can and helping other people out would be the best way to move this thing forward."
