BREAKING 🔴 Randy Orton Suffers Another Devastating Neck Injury After Brutal Attack by Seth Rollins

Seth Rollins Reflects On Viral Reaction To CM Punk’s Return, Was Unhappy Because He Stole Randy Orton’s Moment

Seth “Freakin’” Rollins appeared as a guest on the latest installment of the popular INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet podcast for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling and WWE.

During the discussion, “The Visionary” and “The Revolutionary” of WWE reflected on his WrestleMania 40 injury scare, how much pain he was in, CM Punk’s WWE return and his viral reaction to it being largely because he stole Randy Orton’s moment, as well as his memorable Money In The Bank cash-in for “The Heist of the Century” at WrestleMania 31.

Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview sent to us directly by Chris Van Vliet where the WWE Superstar touches on the aforementioned topics at length.

On if there were any concerns he wasn’t going to make it to WrestleMania 40 due to injury: “No, I just didn’t know what shape I was gonna be in by the time we got to WrestleMania.”

On how much pain he was in: “At that point the pain wasn’t so bad. So the match with Jinder Mahal would have been in January. I had basically really sprained my MCL pretty bad and tore my meniscus. The meniscus tear was an older tear that I think got displaced. So I’d basically been wrestling on a torn meniscus for as long as I can remember but I had a kind of a mechanism to sort it out. Whenever I kind of dislodged it, it put the meniscus into a different position in my knee. I don’t need to get into the anatomy of all that, but basically it was really painful when I would do specific things. So I just had to be smart. So I took, obviously, Rumble off, Chamber off, but then I came back in a brace and I did some live events. I had wrestled Solo Sikoa on one of the Mondays leading up to WrestleMania as well, mostly because I just wanted to get a feel for it. I wanted to know what I could and couldn’t do and I didn’t want to wrestle with a brace at WrestleMania because I hate wrestling with a brace. So I wasn’t in a ton of pain only because I had gone through the pain the weeks leading up to it, kind of like trial runs. I was like let me test this out at these live events, and then let me test it out on TV. Let me see what’s going to hurt me. Basically like stab, stab, stab, okay, now I know what not to do, now I know how to work around it. Then I just had booked the surgery for right after. I knew what the end game was at Mania. I’m like, let’s just get through that. I want to help, I think I can be an integral part of this so let’s do that, and then I’ll go get it fixed and take a little bit of time.”

On if he thought CM Punk would ever come back to WWE: “When he joined the broadcast team on Fox, when they were doing that Backstage show I thought to myself okay, maybe there’s an opportunity here. Then when he joined AEW I kind of thought maybe he’ll have a twilight run here. But there were then a lot of times where I just thought, you know, because I know he makes it out like he didn’t really like the other guy that was in charge, but the truth is he didn’t really get along with the current guy that’s in charge either. It wasn’t like they were pals as well. So I think that even when Triple H took over, I didn’t think there would be an olive branch to be had, so kind of 50/50 but I would waver more towards no, I never thought it was gonna happen.”
On if he knew CM Punk was coming back at Survivor Series: “No, that was a bit of a surprise.”

On his viral reaction: “You know what I wasn’t happy about was Randy had just come back from a long hiatus. That was his moment. It was a great moment. The reaction for him when he came through the curtain was unreal. We went out there, there was 10 of us out there, and we went out there and had a hell of a contest. [We] just didn’t really need him, but you know, it was Chicago, it’s his city, it’s just the most classic make everything about me CM Punk moment I’ve ever seen. When you’re in that moment, your adrenaline just going through the roof, you’re on the top of a cage celebrating with your pals, sold out Allstate Arena going bananas. Then that happens and it’s no longer about the performance. It’s no longer about Randy. It’s no longer about what you had done to get to that point. It’s just, ‘Hi guys, it’s about me. Remember I’m the guy that you miss, remember me, guys?’ So yeah, just another kind of throw that on the pile of disgusting CM Punk moments. But don’t worry, he’s not selfish. He’s in it for helping everybody else.”

On his WrestleMania 31 Money in the Bank cash-in: “There might be camera footage of this somewhere, but I’m just sitting in this chair right outside of the curtain in Gorilla. This was a smaller Gorilla at the time, we hadn’t expanded it to this big one yet. I remember Michael Hayes is in the producer seat and Hunter and Vince are on the far side. I want to say there was panic about the time because we were still on pay-per-view, so we have to be off at this time. It wasn’t like an option to overrun like on Peacock. They want a certain time period. With streaming they’re awesome because of that, you get a little window and you’re not strict because the advertising model is a little different. So it’s like at the time we had to be off, done. So I remember sitting there and thinking oh shoot, they’re not going to make it, we’re going to have to do this tomorrow, that’s what I was thinking. I was just if it doesn’t work, we’ll just do it tomorrow, just hoping that my idea doesn’t go up in smoke. So fortunately, they are professionals, and they hit their cue when they needed to and the rest is history.”