Sami Zayn Talks The Evolution Of His Character, WWE's Creative Process

During the latest episode of Out of Character with Ryan Satin, Sami Zayn spoke about the evolution of his character in WWE.

“One of the things I really like about the character stuff I’ve been doing for a while is it’s all kind of transitioned seamlessly into the next phase. If you go back, I come back from injury in 2018 or 2019, I start losing. Then I do this thing where I say I’m gonna make it about somebody else and become Shinsuke Nakamura’s manager or whatever. That transitions into this thing as the great liberator, then I win the Intercontinental title and that gets taken away from me. I come back and win, and I lose and claim it was a conspiracy. Then I go down this crazy conspiracy rabbit hole. Each part of the character made sense because of the previous thing that happened. It’s not like, ‘Hey, I’m doing a new thing, and here it is. Sami Zayn acts like this now or talks like this now.’ Why is he acting this way all of a sudden? It’s less about the past and more about forward. What’s the next step from here? What’s the next step for the character logically? That way it’s adding onto the layers that are already there.”

On adjusting to the creative process in WWE:

“When you work for WWE, there’s a lot of moving parts. It’s a well-produced show. Yeah, it can be chaotic at times but for the most part, we have a lot of people on the ball. Sometimes, too many hands are on it….if only people knew how good everyone in WWE is. They don’t know, and you’ll never know. There are times when I’m frustrated with it. I’m saying when things are going awry and I’m frustrated and I’m about to go out and I go, ‘This just shouldn’t happen.’ This should be the week where it all explodes so that this never happens again. But it never happens, we always pull it off. It’s a testament to how talented everybody is. It’s crazy. This shouldn’t work, but it does. Just once, I’d love for it to not work so we go, ‘Guys, we can’t keep operating this way, we need to have things set beforehand. We can’t have it this close to the wire.’ But no, we always pull it off, so that’s why it keeps happening.”