The newest edition of Cody Rhodes’ interview podcast What Do You Want To Talk About? features Rhodes’ boss, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque. It was taped before Pat McAfee’s surprise return last Friday on SmackDown, so there are no big twists in Cody’s WrestleMania 42 feud with Randy Orton (and McAfee, and maybe TKO chairman Ari Emanuel?), or the larger WWE/TKO power struggle angle it now seems to be part of.
But there is some interesting context to the story behind the on-screen
story. It’s especially timely coming just after Post Wrestling’s report on Levesque’s communications with WWE president Nick Khan about his father-in-law and former boss Vince McMahon circa 2023, when McMahon returned between scandals to sell the company — and involve himself in creative whenever he felt like it, despite public insistence that he wasn’t.
Post’s latest reminded us that McMahon overruled Levesque on the winner of Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39, which is why on What Do You Want To Talk About? Rhodes asked if Haitch felt like WrestleMania 40 was the first where he was truly in charge of WWE creative. Levesque replied:
“I think so. Though, there was — and again, this is where I’m terrible with times — but it’s not like one day, ‘Here, it’s yours’ and everything else went away. There was so many aspects to that of, ‘Hey, Vince is stepping away. You’re going to take this spot, but he’s chiming in.’ And he [was] still meeting with me all the time and still, you know, directing traffic from the side. And there’s no real, it’s a weird, no real clear moment for me. But I would consider it that, yes.”
Levesque described why some of those times when McMahon was “directing traffic from the side” were difficult to navigate:
“At the end of the day, when people are like, ‘Yeah, but it’s your decision, right?’ Yeah, sort of.
“You know what I mean? Like you’re — yes, and you have to defend your position and you have to be able to sell that to people and explain it to people. If it’s a little bit not your position or a little bit, ‘Well, why did this happen?’ And you don’t want to say, ‘Well, because, you know, it wasn’t totally my decision.’”
He then transitioned away from that topic by talking about the overall complexities of the job:
“There’s so many aspects to what we do, even just on a regular, general daily basis. You’re putting something out there and in some manner — you’re like, in an ideal world, I would do this. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a realistic world, where I can’t do that because of this and this. I can’t do that because of this and I can’t move this here because — it could be something as simple as these two people don’t get along, or I know this person has an injury that I can’t put all that there or whatever the moment, the sequence, the scenario is. There’s so many factors to all of it…
“I wish it was as simple as what people think when they just go, ‘Well, why didn’t they just do this?’ I wish it was that simple. I really do.”
It’s not clear how or even if this is playing out on the Road to WrestleMania 42, but it seems clear Triple H wasn‘t initially as in control of creative as WWE insisted he was.
Check out the Cody’s entire interview with The Game here.
