Comfortability was what Balor was feeling in his previous role and he did not like that.
In June of 2022, Edge was kicked out of The Judgment Day and the new version of the group was established with Finn Balor, Rhea Ripley, Damian Priest and eventually, Dominik Mysterio joined.
Balor has been enjoying his time in this current position and he told UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier during their sit-down chat that being in Judgment Day has reignited his passion for the wrestling business. Balor added that the babyface role he was in made him comfortable and he does not think that’s a good place to be.
It’s reignited my passion for the business (being in Judgment Day). I don’t wanna say I was getting repetitive or stale but, I was getting very comfortable in the routine the I was in and I could go out there with my eyes closed and kind of perform and I felt fine, I felt comfortable and I don’t think that’s a good place to be. You wanna kind of push yourself and you wanna be excited to go out there and try something new and you know, I’d really wanted to dive into this heel character for a very long time and when I returned to NXT a couple years ago, that was the idea was, you know, to kind of to turn heel and start the character there and bring it back to Raw and SmackDown but in the timeframe of returning to NXT and turning heel, COVID happened and it took the live audience out of the equation so when you don’t have the live audience to play off, you can’t really be a genuine heel, especially someone who was notoriously a babyface his whole career. So it was very difficult for me to portray a heel with no audience to interact with so that’s where we got the ‘Prince’ tweener character where he was kind of a cool bad guy, kind of a cool good guy but somewhere in the middle. So I felt kind of robbed of that opportunity to play that heel character that I’d want to do and then, the time came that-that second run in NXT had came to an end, I came back to Raw and SmackDown, straight back to being babyface Finn and it was something that I was very comfortable doing but, I don’t like being comfortable, especially 22 years in. I want something new, I want something different, I wanna change and the opportunity came to turn heel and join Edge in The Judgment Day and that kind of all got flipped on its head in one night and we kicked Edge out… That was the day of because I was under the impression — the week before, I had kind of gotten a hint, ‘Hey, you’re going with The Judgment Day. You’re gonna be with Edge, Damian and Rhea’ and when I showed up on the day, they said, ‘Oh no, change of plan. Edge is out, you’re in.’
On night two of WrestleMania 39, Balor lost to Edge inside Hell in a Cell. Looking back on past WrestleManias, he spoke about his entrance at WrestleMania 34 which was to honor the LGBTQ+ community. He looks at that as one of his greatest achievements in wrestling.
A couple years ago at WrestleMania, we’d done the LGBTQ entrance at WrestleMania which was the biggest platform that I had to kind of introduce that element into the WWE universe and it was something that I feel strongly about that, you know, that community isn’t necessarily looked down upon in our business but it’s not really represented or at that time, it wasn’t represented and I felt like that needed to be addressed and you know, that’s something that I’m very, very proud of and a moment that… I look back on fondly as probably one of my greatest achievements in this business.
Balor suffered a head injury in the aforementioned Hell in a Cell match that required him to receive stitches. He shared an image of the wound on his Instagram.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the original source with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
