During a recent interview with Al Arabiya English, Daniel Bryan discussed his thoughts on being the WWE SmackDown! Live General Manager, the Greatest Royal Rumble show and more. You can check out some highlights below:
On being the WWE SmackDown! Live General Manager: “Part of me sometimes is like, what am I doing here. I would just rather be… What’s really hard for me is my passion for wrestling. A lot of fans love the Rock, right? When they grew up, they loved watching the Rock…so they were like ‘smell what the Rock is cookin’!’ and all that kind of stuff. I was always like, ugh, get me past all these long interview segments I want to see the wrestling. I liked Dean Malenko right? They were complete opposite ends of the spectrum. I got better at talking because it was a requirement for the job. That’s not my passion—my passion is for the in ring stuff. Doing the GM stuff—it’s good in the sense that it’s helped me learn how to become a better talker, but it’s not necessarily something that I’m passionate about. What’s the lady’s name who wrote Eat Pray Love? She wrote another book and I forget what it’s called but I read that. I really liked it. What she said is, every job has a bad part. Being a writer—a lot of people want to be writers, because they think about the writing part. But it’s not just the writing part. It’s writing, and submitting it to somebody, and having somebody tear apart your writing that you spent two years writing this book and they’re telling you that it’s not good, and then doing it all over again, and submitting it again—the people that are successful at writing put up with the parts that are really hard. There are parts about being a wrestler that are really hard. The constant grind of the travel, and all that kind of stuff. As a wrestler, I was very good at putting up with the parts that are very hard because I love the wrestling so much. Putting up with the parts that are really hard, when you’re doing the part that you don’t like [laughs] isn’t as easy. That’s kind of my thoughts on being GM.”
On the Greatest Royal Rumble show in Saudi Arabia: “This is something that I’m really excited about. I don’t know if I’m coming or not, but I’m crossing my fingers that I am coming to the show in Saudi Arabia on April 27th. Wrestlemania is a big event, the biggest event of the year for us, but I think, historically, the show on the 27th might end up being more important, if you look at where WWE’s trajectory goes and our influence on the region. I think it’s really cool that we’re having such a big show in a stadium in Saudi Arabia with them behind it, because that could be a shift to more shows in the region where we obviously have a huge fan base. If you look at Wrestlemania, it’s huge, and I don’t want to dismiss that at all, but what we’re doing in Saudi Arabia… You can tell that they’re not just doing a show in Saudi Arabia, it’s a 50-person Royal Rumble match that’s bringing every person from both brands. One it’s a huge expense but it also shows how much we’re putting into it, and how much Saudi Arabia is putting into it, and if it’s really successful, how much that means we’ll be in the region more. I think that’s super cool.”
On his fame: “I have weird thoughts about my fame. It changes. It evolves over time. I did an interview, I forget where it was, and the interviewer looked at me and said, ‘I feel like you feel guilty about your success.’ No one had ever pointed that out to me before, and I think that’s very true. I have a lot of very smart friends and people around me who try to encourage me and say, ‘hey, you can use that to improve the world.’ I love wrestling. It’s really weird. It’s a weird fascination with this thing we call wrestling. I love it. But there have been times where I’m just like, what have I been doing with my life? There’s so many problems! I need to be going out and changing the world! But if I wanted to tackle climate change, for example, I know a little bit about climate change, but the people that are working on it, I would have to get in another 20 years of hard study just to get where these people actually are. One of the better things I can do is bring attention to these issues. One of my friends specifically is very into saying, hey, you can change things, but if you’re talking about division of labor and what you can do that would benefit the world the most, it might not be actually doing it, going out there and doing climate science, it may be going out there and bringing attention to it. The fame allows you to do more than you could if you don’t have it, but sometimes it’s really hard for me, because I don’t like all the attention, and my wife has two reality shows and a YouTube channel, and WWE follows me around, so it’s like…
