Sami Zayn Hoping For First-Ever Match On WWE SummerSlam's Main Card — Exclusive

WWE star Sami Zayn has had an interesting 2024 so far. After winning a gauntlet match in March to become the No. 1 contender, Zayn beat Gunther for the WWE Intercontinental Championship on Night 1 of WrestleMania 40, snapping a historic 666-day title run. Little more than a month later, he stepped outside the familiar confines of the squared circle to take part in the in the 12-day Netflix is a Joke Fest 2024 comedy festival, taking the Sami Zayn & Friends show to Avalon Hollywood. 

After successfully defending his title in a triple-threat match against Bronson Reed & Chad Gable at Clash at the Castle, Zayn retained at King & Queen of the Ring, this time besting Gable in singles action. Then came Money in the Bank 2024, a weekend in which his in-ring and onstage ventures were both in play. Prior to defeating Bron Breakker in another successful IC title defense, Zayn grabbed the mic at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, bringing with him WWE champions Cody Rhodes and Bayley, in addition to Hall of Famer Trish Stratus & his WrestleMania 2022 opponent, Johnny Knoxville of "Jackass" fame.

In a couple of weeks, Zayn will once again take his show on the road to another WWE premium live event, as Sami Zayn & Friends Do Cleveland is scheduled for the night before SummerSlam 2024, an event at which he may once again face Breakker — with Ilja Dragunov potentially involved in some form — if we're correctly reading the writing on the wall. But before all of that, Sami Zayn sat down with Wrestling Inc. for an exclusive interview to talk about these very things.

Kevin Tall: How are you doing today, man?

Sami Zayn: Yeah, not too bad. I'm on, I guess, the closest thing I could consider to a vacation at the moment for a few days before we go in between tours in Mexico and Japan. So I have a few days and I'm in Prince Edward Island in Canada, so I'm trying to just catch my breath.

I wanted to talk to you about some of the things you're doing outside of a WWE ring. You did the Sami Zayn & Friends show ahead of Money in the Bank of Toronto. Now you're hosting one during SummerSlam weekend. How did you get involved in the world of comedy?

Well, to be honest, it's something I've always really enjoyed. It's something I've always liked, something I've always wanted to do, and I feel like wrestling... one of the beautiful thing about wrestling is that it wraps up many artistic mediums into one. You get a little bit of acting and drama and comedy and athleticism and all sort of things. When you do it right, it mixes all of these things really beautifully. But I like a lot of those elements individually as well.

So comedy is something I was always interested in. The comedic side of wrestling has always appealed to me. I've done a lot of that throughout my career. And then the opportunity just sort of came up not long ago when I got sort of an outside manager, like an L.A. agent manager type guy. And it's just something he saw in me and he found an opportunity for me to be a part of this really big comedy festival called Netflix is a Joke. And it being off the heels of the announcement that WWE would be partnering with Netflix, I thought, 'This could be an interesting fit.' So I did it. Well, I agreed to it rather, and then I had to actually come up with the hard part, which is doing it and coming up with the show.

And then it was so addictive that I wanted to do it again. And so I thought I would do it again in Toronto and I did. And now I'm doing another one SummerSlam weekend right after SmackDown in Cleveland. So the challenging part of it is that every show is different because I have access to different guests every time, and I write the show kind of around the guests. So if I don't have a guest, it's not just something I can plug and play. So now we're just a couple of weeks out from this show and I'm kind of stressing out a little bit about just, I have to basically write a new show and I feel like it's going to have to be like that every single time because it depends on the guests that I have.

So anyways, it's all this to say I did kind of stumble into it and this is only my third go around, but the first two have been great, especially the Toronto one. It was remarkable how much better it got so quickly after just doing one show. I learned a lot of valuable lessons, lessons on how to do it a little bit better. And that second show reflected that. So hopefully this one coming up in Cleveland's even better than that.

Do you have any specific guests in mind for Cleveland's edition?

Well, so ideally my vision for it is it's not just like a stand-up show. I do some stand-up in there. And depending on who the guests are, there might be more. But my vision originally for it was to mix guests from the world of comedy, from television and wrestling and just have a mix and not just have it be like a very wrestling heavy show. But in Toronto, the guests that I had access to, it was more wrestling focused. I had a couple of improv comics from Montreal that people might not necessarily have known, but they added a lot to the show. And I had a television performer, an actor called Andrew Phung, who's on a very popular Canadian television show. Two of them actually. One called "Kim's Convenience" and one called "Run the Burbs."

And then I also had wrestling guests; Cody Rhodes showed up, Trish Stratus showed up, Bailey showed up. Johnny Knoxville against my wishes showed up. So it's like a pretty good list of characters, a hell of a lineup if I may say so myself. But again, it's going to fluctuate every single time as to who's there this. This time around, again, I know we're just a couple of weeks out, but I'm still tinkering with ideas.

But I figure with it being right off the heels of SmackDown and right before SummerSlam, I'll probably have access to a lot of the guys and girls that are around at the time from WWE. And these are WWE fans showing up to these shows more than it is comedy fans, I would assume. So you want to give them WWE superstars and people that they're familiar with. And I like to write the show in a way where they're getting a couple of fun surprises as well.

In which ways, if any, is getting up on stage like that different for you than say, stepping into the ring, except for the obvious things like wardrobe options and assuming you're not going to get punched in the face for telling jokes, although that has happened.

Yeah, it has. It's hard to explain. So I've been wrestling for a long time, so I'm obviously more comfortable going out there. Look, I stress a lot. In some ways I'm an easygoing guy and in some ways I can be kind of high-strung when it comes to the art that I'm putting out because I want it to be good. And then there's just nerves always before I go out, even whether it's WrestleMania or just a live event in Toledo, Ohio, or wherever it is. I've got nerves before I go out there always.

And it's funny because the nerves vary from time to time. What am I actually nervous about or what's getting my system going? Part of it is just adrenaline about to go out and perform, especially when you're going to wrestle, there's the risk of injury and stuff like that. So that's kind of one thing that I sometimes worry about. And then with television, it's a different animal because there's time constraints and you're losing time. It's crazy. People have no idea how crazy it is. You're about to go out there and you're like, you just lost three minutes. Oh wait, you picked up a minute on this side. And it's just the craziest thing. And it's like having that adaptability and having the pressure of having to think on your feet. So I still deal with that even though I've been wrestling all these years.

But comedy is a different animal because it's not just... I'm not even worried about flubbing my words or messing up jokes or anything like that. It's like I'm putting these shows together and they're kind of interwoven from one bit to the next bit to the next bit. It's all kind of linked, and I don't really get a chance to get off stage and I have all these different things to remember with all these different people. And so it's just a different kind of stress. But it is very, very stressful. Those last couple of shows, those two shows I did each time we started, I think five minutes late because they're like, "All right, you ready to go on?" I'm like, "No, I'm not. One sec." And I'm just trying to find a quiet corner, and I'm just blanking. I'm like, "What am I going to do? Why am I even doing this?"

But they both turned out really great. So I've joked a lot because sometimes I've been in stressful situations, even with matches where I know even my opponents get kind of stressed out. And I've kind of joked, although I do believe in it, that that stress is kind of what propels you to the next level. You got to use that stress. And I don't even know if I'd be comfortable going out there if I wasn't stressed. It's kind of like I need it. That's just me, anyways; other people might feel a very different way.

Looking ahead to the near future in WWE, it doesn't look like anything's made official yet, but the writing seems to be on the wall for another match with Bron Breakker at SummerSlam. If that happens, it would be your second time working the show, if I'm correct, with the first time coming, I want to say eight years ago on the pre-show. Would a match at SummerSlam check off any kind of professional bucket list item for you? Or is it not a big deal, just another Saturday in August?

No, it's not that it's another Saturday. Look, anytime you get to perform in front of whatever it is, I think 50,000 people or more are going to be there. It's crazy. That's not something that anybody should ever take lightly ever. No matter how many times you've done it, in my opinion. And we can play cool and act like it's another day at the office; it's not. It's 50,000 people. That's cool. I don't care who you are.

But it is funny that you mentioned, I've never actually been on SummerSlam. People don't know that because I've had a really pretty decent career, and especially these last few years, I've had a really good WrestleMania track record, if you look back at all my WrestleMania's, especially over the last three years. But if you go back my entire career, I've had a great WrestleMania track record. SummerSlam, I've never even been on the show. I did work one SummerSlam pre-show, I want to say maybe 2015 or something. And believe it or not, it was actually the Dudley Boyz last ever match as a team. So we do all that distinction myself and Adrian Neville at the time, Pac, as he's known today.

Yeah, I'm not a SummerSlam guy. It's weird. More of a WrestleMania guy than a SummerSlam guy. So it'll be nice to get on the show and hopefully have a pretty good match that people care about because people seem to be really into, well, they seem to be into everything really these days. But I think they're excited to see how this stuff with Breakker and myself and who knows how Ilja Dragunov factors in. I don't know.

Do you expect that to be made official anytime soon?

Well, I think we're a few weeks away, and like you said, I'm reading the writing on the wall just like you. I don't know what the matches are, but I can see where things are kind of laying out. And maybe there's an off chance that I don't end up on the card again, because you're seeing more and more that the PLEs these days are smaller cards. So there's a chance that even though I'm in a great story with Breakker and now Dragunov and all this stuff, there is a chance that who knows it doesn't get on the card. I don't know. But if I am on the SummerSlam card, I'm assuming it's going to be against Bron Breakker or Ilja Dragunov or some kind of mix, unless another contender pops up in the next couple of weeks. I really don't know. I'm just kind of reacting to the present time.

[Editor's note: Sami Zayn appeared on the pre-show for SummerSlam 2016]

Talk to me about working with guys like Bron and Ilja. How do you think their main roster runs have gone so far? Both are still fairly new.

It's fresh as a daisy, you can't judge it just yet, but I'd say they're both off to great starts. And Breakker especially. Bron has definitely been packaged and presented, and he definitely holds up his end of the bargain when it comes to it, but just sort of this intense athletic freak of nature. So I think they both have extremely promising careers. And Dragunov, I love his style. I love his in-ring work. I've been watching him for a minute. I think he's really good. He has something that not a lot of people have, which is an innate understanding of the struggle that makes wrestling a beautiful thing. When he's in there, it looks like he's fighting for his life. And there's a lot of great guys, a lot of great performers in WWE, but very few have that quality where you just really believe that this guy is deep in the trenches and it's taking everything in him just to keep his head above water. I think that's a great quality to have in a wrestler, and he's got it, and I don't see it very often, and he's definitely got it.

Bron Breakker, I mean, I'm not the first one to say it, but the intensity and the athletic abilities he has, again, not something you see very often. I think they're both very unique performers. I do think those two guys are the future. You can't judge their career now a few months in, but both are looking very promising. And I think five, six years from now, they're going to be making a lot of noise. They're going to be the guys carrying the torch, I think.

Right on Sami, I think we're out of time. So thanks very much for sitting down with me today. Appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing what you've got coming up.

Thanks a lot, buddy. Thanks for having me.

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