EXCLUSIVE: Sami Zayn Reveals If There Was Blowback To Him Mentioning AEW On WWE Raw
During Sami Zayn's chat with Cultaholic Wrestling's Tom Campbell
Mar 30, 2022
Back on the May 27, 2019, edition of Monday Night Raw, Sami Zayn debuted his Electric Chair segment which featured him being asked unfiltered questions by members of the audience while he sat in an actual electric chair.
The episode of Raw took place only two days after All Elite Wrestling's inaugural show, Double Or Nothing, and Zayn mentioned the new promotion during the segment.
The Electric Chair wouldn't return after this and it was scrapped following the first edition.
Speaking with Cultaholic Wrestling's Tom Campbell ahead of WrestleMania 38, Zayn revealed if he received any blowback behind the scenes for mentioning AEW.
"Yes and no. It was the next day after AEW had their first-ever pay-per-view so it was a very hot topic at the time, and actually it was hot off the announcement that AEW was going to be a company and it was just so new and so fresh and we figured it was on the front of everybody's minds. So I felt like it was bound to come up and it kind of weirdly didn't," Zayn began.
"Also at that point, some of the questions, I thought it was going to be a lot more provocative because it was unscripted. And while I was out there I felt that the questions were a little bit flat, to be honest. So me, using my judgement, I figured this needed some pizzazz and so I brought it up myself.
"So I think that was the part that there was a little bit of a blowback to when I got back. It wasn't so much that it came up. It was sort of the way it came up. The way I sort of addressed it when it wasn't really needing to be addressed," he added.
Zayn noted, though, that the fact people still talk about the segment three years on shows mentioning AEW had the desired effect.
"In my defence, the fact that we're still talking about it three years later tells me my instincts were right because we needed something memorable to make this a kind of shocking segment…But unfortunately, that was the death blow of the Electric Chair segment."
Zayn will be in action at WrestleMania Sunday on April 3 when he will go one-on-one with Johnny Knoxville.
Check out Zayn's full chat with Cultaholic Wrestling here.