Mark Henry was recently a guest on Chris Jericho's Talk is Jericho podcast, where he spoke about what made him decide to leave the WWE and join All Elite Wrestling.

"When I retired, I thought I was going to be an employee of WWE. At some point, I was gonna be somebody that had an influence on the business. I was like, I want to be an executive. I know enough about this business and every facet of it, and there were people that were in jobs and talent development, and people that were in jobs in talent relations and people in jobs in corporate, that I knew the business better than them. And I had a way of fostering relationships.

That’s been the number one thing that I’ve been able to accomplish in my life more than anything else is I foster good relationships with people, and people realize that I’m not a screw up, that I’m going to do stuff that’s going to be well thought out. And that is going to benefit kids because that’s where my heart is. I want kids to have experiences, and WWE, they were not at a place where they wanted to hire me for that. And I asked. I wrote it up. I spent months putting together a two-year plan of events.

I was like, what else can I do? I just had to call and say, ‘Hey man, I’m going to start looking for work because I know what I can do well, and I don’t feel like I’m valued in that capacity.’ And when I got the ‘no’, it didn’t come from Vince [McMahon]. It didn’t come from Brad Blum. It came from Johnny (John Laurinaitis), who was an employee. It’s not his place to tell me ‘no’. If the duties got delegated to somebody that it’s not their job to tell me, then it’s over. You got to know when the door’s being closed?"