Brodie Lee, the Exalted One of AEW’s Dark Order, was Chris Jericho’s guest on the latest installment of the Talk is Jericho podcast. It was a great discussion chock full of interesting anecdotes and details about Lee’s journey to All Elite Wrestling. We will be breaking up this recap into a few parts.

Here are some highlights of Brodie Lee’s talk with Chris Jericho, courtesy of SEScoops correspondent Eric Brown:

Brodie Lee on Struggling in WWE, Working with Vince McMahon

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Jericho talks about how early on he felt like Brodie had all of the tools necessary to succeed in WWE. Brodie says the biggest hang up was: “The way I do talk. Vince doesn’t see a person who looks like me, talking like me. And I don’t think he could get over that. He saw a backwoods hillbilly who talked in a Southern draw, and being from Rochester, New York, and being somewhat eloquent, he didn’t understand and it just didn’t compute with him.”

“I had my supporters, just not vocal ones.. not ones that were willing to go to bat for me. Once I fell into a role – no matter what I pitched, no matter what I showed anybody – I just wasn’t digging my way out of it. To the audience of one.” He talks about Arn Anderson speaking up for him in meetings, but eventually telling him, “I’m just going to stop speaking up for you, because I don’t think it’s doing you any favors.”

Says his peak in WWE was probably when he was the Intercontinental Champion, and specifically cites his ladder match with Dolph Ziggler. “But even then, I don’t think I won a match on TV with the belt, did a bunch of DQs, lost a bunch of matches, and it almost was like I lost favor almost instantly, as soon as I won the belt.. Never even had a chance to do anything with it.” Brodie talks about different ideas and angles he pitched for his character, but that Vince “wasn’t buying them.”

One idea was that he would be a ‘collector’ of sorts – inspired by serial killers – where he would collect something from each person he beat. “The problem just became that I wasn’t beating anybody.. so it was hard to collect from people to do that (laughs).” Another was that he would be a ‘smart monster,’ where he would speak the way he does, and also break down his opponents in an intelligent way. But again, the hang-up seemed to be his way of talking. He recalls going into Vince’s office and Vince asking him to do a Southern drawl. Brodie said that he’s from New York, and that he thinks it’s going to sound really fake. He tried it, and Vince didn’t like it, which Brodie thought would mean that was the end of that. Yet the very next week, in the script, it called for him to do a Southern accent.

Jericho brings up that it’s strange, considering that Rowan actually did end up getting a ‘smart monster’ gimmick. Brodie jokes, “Exactly, I don’t know if he just didn’t know the difference between us, or.. (laughs)” He says that Vince saw him and Rowan as a team, and always ended up bringing them back together. Jericho draws the comparison to John Morrison, who “goes away, does all these great things, he comes back, and a week-and-a-half later he’s Miz’s tag team partner.”

During the storyline where Randy Orton had allied himself with Bray Wyatt, Brodie predicted to the writers that this would result in Brodie organically getting over with the crowd. The writers told him it wouldn’t work that way, but he noticed every week his crowd reaction increased. By the time Randy turned on them, Brodie was over to the point where he was in a championship match battle royal, as one of the final two competitors along with AJ Styles. The match was supposed to end with both of their feet touching the floor at the same time, leading to a 1 on 1 match the following week. It worked fine in rehearsals, but when they did it live Brodie’s butt slipped on the apron and their feet obviously didn’t hit at the same time. WWE worked around this and said that they touched at the same time, which led to the 1 on 1 match. “And then the next week, AJ – who was the heel – ended up making me tap and pinning me, in the same match.. I was like, ‘Yup, this is the end!” After that, he was off TV for 8 months, but continued to do dark matches, as he hoped his positive reaction from the crowds would encourage Vince to give him another chance.

Says he and Vince “chatted many, many times. He was always very honest with me. he’s like, ‘I just don’t have anything for you right now.'” Jericho interjects, “That’s the worst thing to hear.” He said he would try to brainstorm and work with the writers to come up with something, but “I knew there was nothing coming.. It was literally the most frustrating thing I could imagine, as a career.. You just go sit in catering and watch these shows and you’re like, ‘Man, I know where I could f***ing fit in on these.'”

On his souring relationship with WWE, Brodie mentions a time in Detroit where he sat outside Vince’s office (while he waited for him to finish with a production meeting) for three hours only to be told by Vince that he didn’t want to see anybody. Brodie had various pitches he had written down, but left so frustrated that he threw them in the trash. He recalls eventually getting to see Vince and give him a pitch, which he felt like Vince dismissed by saying that he’d look at it later while on the plane. Eventually, Brodie got Vince’s phone number, and feeling that he had nothing to lose, he texted him asking what was going on with his career. Vince asked him why he wasn’t in the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, which Brodie recalls responding with “Sir, that’s a question that you should probably be able to answer.” Vince replied “Well, you are now.” When he had originally seen the plans for the battle royal, he was set to be one of the final 2 or 3 remaining, which he felt optimistic about, but later found out “they had kayfabed us on the end of the battle royal, and there’s like 10 other people after me.”

One idea pitched to him was to be Sami Zayn’s heater. He thought, “F***, man, that’s exactly what I don’t want to do. That’s exactly what I’ve done my entire career. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to be behind anybody, I just want to go do my thing.” He tried to be optimistic about it and wanted it to work out. They were set to debut on the Smackdown following Wrestlemania, but it was suddenly canceled.

His Relationship with Erick Rowan

On the Bludgeon Brothers: Says he was shown a picture of Demolition and told “this is what [Vince] wants you guys to be.” They felt like they needed up update the look, and he gives Rowan more credit them himself when it came to those ideas. When they first tried on the gear, he thought “we look like a couple of f***ing idiots.” They had to go into Vince’s office to show him, and when they went in he was in the middle of getting a massage. “Vince looks up, and he goes, ‘Yup, love it!’ And I go, ‘Well, do you want to see the other..’ ‘No no, love it!'” They talk about how different talking to Vince can be based on what he’s doing, specifically that it’s always a bad idea to talk to him when he’s eating.

Brodie says that the Bludgeon Brothers’ mallets (which they could not call sledgehammers “for obvious reasons”) were made out of wood and “heavy as hell.” One time, Brodie swung a mallet at Kofi Kingston and hitting the ring mat, and was told afterwards that he “dented the boards” underneath. During a trip to Saudi Arabia, he knew they would not be able to check them onto the plane, so Vince brought them over on his personal plane.

On his relationship with Rowan, “We do make a good tag team,” but “when we first got together in the Wyatt family I despised the man. I hated him.” “He snores more than any man I’ve ever met in my life, so rooming with him was f***ing hell.. if I didn’t fall asleep first, I didn’t sleep. So I would wake up hating him, and then we’d be calling a match, and I’d just thinking about how much I hated him (laughs). So it was a bit of a to-do, but in the long run we became really great friends.” Brodie compares his career trajectory in the WWE to Rowan’s recent spider storyline. “They built him up, he didn’t lose a match, he was beating people weekly. And then Aleister Black beat him two weeks in a row for no reason. And then the spider was revealed and killed. And now who knows what’s going to happen to him.” Jericho says, “And you know he didn’t piss anybody off because he’s not that type of guy.” to which Brodie responds, “No, I think he’s too nice. And that’s the same thing I thought about me in WWE – I might have been too nice, as well.”

He talks about his Wrestlemania moment of The Bludgeon Brothers winning the tag team championships at Wrestlemania against The Usos and The New Day, but unfortunately they were only given 9 minutes for the match, including entrances. “Still, there’s a very cool moment of me holding the belt up and spotting my wife and son in the front row.” Brodie recalls a conversation he had with CM Punk when they were feuding in 2014, “Just so you know, man, everything in WWE could always be better.” “Back then, I’m like, ‘No, f*** this guy, there’s no way that that’s true.’ And it’s been true almost every… The Wyatt family could have been better, The Bludgeon Brothers could have been better, that match could have been [better]. And it’s like, just give us another 10 minutes.”

Brodie talks about how tough Rowan is, and that nobody had even noticed when he tore his bicep in a match. Despite the injury, Rowan was still happy to have a match the following week to drop the titles to The New Day before he had to take time off (Brodie later names this match as his favorite tag match with Rowan). Brodie mentions how both Rowan and himself suffered injuries at almost alternating points, and since they were so often paired together as a tag team, when one of them got hurt it typically put a hold on the other one, as well.

Brodie said he had continued to receive contract offers from WWE up until the day they released him, even though they weren’t using him. “That was their M.O. at that point, ‘Let’s just keep everybody.'” He says it was “quite the conundrum” deciding what the right thing to do was, since he had a wife and kids, and WWE was offering him “ungodly money, honestly. I could never even imagine making that money in wrestling, and it was literally to stay home.” Ultimately, they felt it was better for his sanity to leave.

Requesting his WWE Release

With support from his wife, Brodie asked for his release, and ended up having two 20-minute phone conversations with Vince about what it would take to keep him with WWE. It was at this point he found out that he wasn’t the only one to ask for his release, as others had done so privately. “Hunter even told me later, ‘We can’t release you or it’s going to make [it look] like people are jumping off this sinking ship.'”

On making his release request public: “I never said anything negative about them online. I just said, ‘Look, I asked for my release, thank you everybody for everything.’ I wanted to do it publicly because I knew the court of public opinion was very important to the next move I was going to make. To have the support was important, and I also didn’t want them to be able to control my narrative anymore.” He notes that “Spears had done the same thing a few months earlier, and they had granted his release, so I thought, honestly, that they were going to do it. And then, after the second conversation with Vince, he called me and said ‘Hey man, for business reasons I can’t let you go.’ And I said, ‘Okay, that’s totally fair. It’s your decision, obviously, I signed the contract.'” He asked if he could get out in November, instead of having 6 months added to his contract for having been out for wrist surgery, but was told “That’s a question for somebody else.” Jericho cites his signing with AEW as the window closing for WWE granting releases, which is why Spears was able to get out but Brodie was denied.

He said he had conversations with Triple H about wanting to wrestle. Hunter asked if he wanted to wrestle in NXT or even NJPW, and Brodie was interested in either option, but neither came to fruition. Eventually, Daniel Bryan called him and asked if he wanted to come back to work with him – and being someone that Brodie respects more than almost anybody – he agreed. He and Rowan were originally supposed to win the PPV match against Bryan and Roman Reigns, but the ending was switched at the last moment. He was then given the impression that he would stick around with Rowan for a bit, and hoped to help give him a bit of a boost before he left, but Rowan was then abruptly drafted to Raw and Brodie was simply sent back home.

“I don’t want to speak ill of them, because WWE gave me more in life than I could ever dream of, but man, I just wasn’t picked.”

You can listen to the Talk is Jericho podcast with Brodie Lee embedded below or at Onmy.fm.