Sami Zayn on His Gradual Heel Turn Leading To Becoming Undisputed WWE Champion, Felt Ship Had Sailed On Winning WWE Title After Loss at Royal Rumble 2026, His Time With The Bloodline, The Bloodline Storyline Being What He Will Be Remembered The Most For His WWE Career, & More

A recent episode of the Insight with Chris Van Vliet podcast featured Undisputed WWE Champion Sami Zayn as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Zayn’s thoughts about his gradual heel turn over the course of this year leading to his first Undisputed WWE Championship victory.

“There’s a lot of evolution that’s happened, and part of what I’ve liked about this sort of turn is that it wasn’t done as a conventional turn. It wasn’t done, good guy, good guy, good guy. Now I’m bad. You know what I mean? It was just like a very gradual process. It all started when I lost to Drew at the Royal Rumble. I realized, well, as I said earlier, we’ve played this card, can’t play it again, so something needs to change now. I’d like it to be gradual, and I’d like it to just feel the audience, and I’d like to obviously nudge the audience in a certain direction, but I want to do it in this sort of delicate way, right? There were things that, again, unexpected gifts that fall from the sky, or just hands that you’re dealt that you don’t know are going to be dealt, that sometimes put us on a fast track one way, or took us in a different direction another way. So, for example, when I beat Carmelo Hayes for the title, it went from like 80-20 cheers, it went from like 90-10. I had 10 to work with in the beginning, and I’d like to get that number to like 70-30. Maybe 60-40.

Yeah in January or whatever, just enough to hear one or two guys going boo! I’m like, okay, I can work with that, and I’ll just gently tip those scales. There was this fine balancing point that I wanted to get to, and I couldn’t get to it when I wanted to get to it because that’s just weekly television, and that’s the hand you’re dealt sometimes. A lot of it is just as I said, rolling with the punches, being in the pocket, being present, and dealing with it, and all that kind of stuff. But then when I beat Carmelo Hayes overnight, I was at like 70-30 at that point, and then it just went like 90-10 in the other way as soon as I beat him, and the stuff with Trick was all contributing to it at that time as well. But then when I beat Carmelo, it was like a light switch. So okay, that’s gonna accelerate the process a little bit. I didn’t want to take this character and go well, now I’m a bad guy, crumple it up and do something else. I really like evolving into things. If you look at the trajectory of the character, if you go back starting in 2019 maybe, each little chapter has kind of seamlessly bled into the next thing.”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about how he had thought that the ship had sailed on his hopes of becoming a WWE Champion after his loss to Drew McIntyre at this past January’s Royal Rumble 2026 event.

“Here’s the thing that’s funny about it because even at the start of this year, which was nine months ago, ten months ago now, whatever, I was wrestling Drew, and I didn’t win. I had kind of just battled with it and went, you know what, maybe the ship sailed. I was real close a couple of years ago with all the Bloodline stuff and all that, and even in the fallout of that. Then I was close, but if I lost after losing that match, I was like, well, you can’t tell this story again.

Maybe it’ll happen in some different way, and it did happen in a bit of a different way. But the Cinderella story, underdog who finally wins the big one- we burnt that card; that card was done after losing to Drew because you can only tell that story so many times. You can get them on board once, twice, three times, and it wasn’t the right time. It wasn’t. I didn’t have the momentum that I had a year or two prior to that. But I had to kind of struggle to accept that maybe I just missed the window, slipped through the cracks, and it just won’t happen.

“I’ve had a tremendous career, and winning the world title at that point is just the cherry on top. It would be nice to have, but it’s not like if I never win it, it’s like I never [got it]. You don’t live and die by these things. You kind of just got to look at the big picture.”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about his time as a member of The Bloodline and the evolution of his alliance with the group.

“Well, that’s kind of what makes it work from the jump. That was in the conception of the idea; it’s so ridiculous, that’s part of the appeal of it. My intent in the beginning was more to be kind of like on the periphery, it evolved, and that’s part of the beauty of it. When I say part of the skill set, part of why I loved it so much is the week-to-week adaptation. I had some ideas and I had an overarching blueprint, which more or less kind of came to fruition, which starts here and ends in a championship match eventually down the road with Roman. That’s kind of the blueprint in your head, but some of the week-to-week stuff that you don’t account for, those are just gifts that fall into your lap, and then it’s playing with those gifts, and that’s that adaptability and the improvisational skills and the storytelling skills that I think are really what we do, or a crucial part of what we do, or a crucial part of being really good at what we do, is adapting to those things when they come to you, whether it’s in a match or whether it’s in a storyline. I know this was the plan, but hang on just a sec. Now we’ve got this thing with Jey, and you got to run with it because it’s interesting, and you hadn’t accounted for it ahead of time.

But now you’ve got this gift that fell from the heavens, and running with it. Sometimes that happens in matches, and sometimes it happens in promos, or a lot of times, what’s happened to me, especially most recently with this WWE title thing, is it’s happened in kind of overarching storytelling, where yeah, I know this wasn’t where we were going, but hang on a sec. This is really interesting, and we should probably elaborate on this.”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about his belief that his involvement in The Bloodline storyline will be what fans remember the most for the legacy of his WWE career.

“Probably Bloodline stuff. I think that’s probably what I’d be best remembered for if my career ended before I won the world title or whatever; it might still be what I’m most remembered for 20 years from now if people remember anything about me 20 years from now. But I was also just very proud of it. But I’ve had so many things throughout my career. I’m just giving you the answer of what I think would be best remembered, but also simultaneously something I’m extremely proud of, but there’s a ton of stuff in my career I’m extremely proud of.”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about his belief that he should have defeated Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Championship at Elimination Chamber 2023 in his hometown of Montreal.

“At the time, I thought there was a case to be made for it, but going back to the domino effect thing, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t think it’s ludicrous to say I should have. If you were watching at that time, I think anybody could have made that argument. But it was just again timing, and Cody was also red hot at that time, and they were building to something. Then it leads to Cody the next year, and then it’s more gratifying. Whatever it is, just yeah, I don’t know. Could, should, would- would it have worked? I think so. But who’s to say?”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about the trajectory of his WWE career from his feud with Johnny Knoxville and match at WrestleMania 38 to working with Roman Reigns and The Usos in The Bloodline.

“No idea. I can’t even fathom it. I don’t know, because it just is. So I can’t play what-ifs or hypotheticals. I don’t even know how to answer that because everything is such a domino effect in this company and in life, but in this company, it’s almost impossible to say what would have happened if X or if Y, these variables.

The biggest break I ever had in my career, minus Bloodline and WWE stuff, what got me booked in the United States to begin with had nothing to do with me. It was because another wrestler from Canada called Sexy Eddie went to the States, and I won’t get into the gory details here, but there are gory details because he got cut open and there was a bunch of blood and he was just an insane showman and he captured people’s imaginations in this one night where all of a sudden these people were like who are these Canadian guys? Because of that I got booked. So the biggest break in my career had nothing to do with me. It was because Sexy Eddie got cut open and had blood spewing out of his arm but still decided to put on a show. If he doesn’t put on that show, I don’t know how my career would have gone. Maybe I’d still be here. Maybe I’d still be in this chair. Maybe I’d be WWE Champion. Maybe I wouldn’t. I have no idea. But there’s such a crazy domino effect that takes place that you can’t even begin to get your head around.”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about his time in WWE’s NXT brand and if there was any talk of him wearing a mask similar to his El Generico character in the indies.

“I didn’t know when they signed me because I also knew, you know, well, you signed me for what you saw. So I’m assuming you liked what you saw, I don’t know what they wanted out of me. So there’s a lot to me, and there’s a lot of avenues you could take. So one was this masked type character. So I’ll clarify. Let me elaborate. But when they’re asking you to come up with names or whatever. I didn’t know what they wanted out of me, so I sort of had these categories, because again, I just didn’t know what they wanted out of me. I know I look like a redhead; I could look Irish or Sheamus’s cousin on TV if you wanted me to be Sheamus’s little cousin, I could be that. Maybe they want me for that. I’m also French Canadian. I’m also Arab, and there’s the Mexican stuff or the masked stuff. So I was presenting all these different categories of names, not just broad names.”

Zayn also gave his thoughts about how he ended up with the ring name of “Sami Zayn” in WWE.

“So I think what I did see as a huge opportunity is to kind of be myself. A huge part of that is obviously my ethnicity and my religion, I guess, to an extent. Just like it’s a big part of who I am. Not that it’s a day-to-day thing, but it’s a big part of the concoction that has made me who I am. To be able to represent that in a way that has never really been represented was very attractive to me. Because as an Arab, you have heightened awareness of it. Growing up in the 80s, 90s, and especially in a post 9/11 world where the stereotypes and the racism and all that stuff is just crazy, and it’s normalized and it’s accepted, and it was sort of like the only way you saw your people represented in Western culture. I was a child of the West. My household was Arab and Muslim, but for all intents and purposes, I look like just some white kid. So, the idea of kind of smashing that boundary a little bit of being an Arab and not playing the caricature, especially the heel caricature of an Arab.”

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com 1, 2, & 3, F4WOnline.com 1, 2, & 3