Eric Bischoff believes Paul Heyman helped Roman Reigns move beyond simply portraying The Tribal Chief by teaching him to think, speak and carry himself as the character even when WWE’s cameras were not recording. The discussion followed Heyman’s appearance with The Undertaker, where he explained how he worked with Reigns after they joined forces in August 2020. Heyman would call Reigns—whose real name is Joe Anoa’i—and hold ordinary conversations with him for 30 minutes or longer.
Instead of asking what Joe had eaten or how his day had gone, Heyman framed his questions around The Tribal Chief. He would ask what The Tribal Chief had for breakfast or whether The Tribal Chief had taken his children to school. The exercise was designed to make Reigns answer as the character until that personality felt natural.
Speaking on his 83 Weeks podcast,, Bischoff compared Heyman’s approach to method acting, explaining that some of wrestling’s biggest names became closely connected to their television personas.
“What Paul did was really introduce Joe to an indirect way of becoming a method actor, teaching him, helping him learn how to become a character in a next-level kind of way. To 90% of the talent out there, your character is what you wear to the ring, or your music, or your ring entrance in general.”
Bischoff said many wrestlers have distinctive entrance music, clothing and moves, but those features alone do not create a fully developed personality. In his view, Reigns reached another level when he stopped acting like The Tribal Chief and began living inside the role.
“When you take that to the next level and you become your character, that’s when s**t gets real. Ironically—well, the money gets real, let’s put it that way. The success gets real because you’ve transcended what everybody else does, which is going out and portraying what you think a wrestler should be, which is 95% of the people that do it for a living.”
Bischoff compared Reigns’ transformation to Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and The Undertaker. He said those performers were able to make their characters believable because the personalities presented on television did not disappear when they left the arena. According to Bischoff, Heyman found a clever way to introduce that same commitment to Reigns without formally presenting it as acting training.
“If you talk to a wrestler and say, ‘Hey, I want to sit you down with a method acting coach,’ you may get a fake kind of, ‘Oh wow, that’s great, let’s do that.’ There’s a resistance to it. But if you can kind of teach somebody to do it without calling it method acting and get them thinking about it and understanding and beginning to feel what happens when they go out in front of people once they actually start becoming the character instead of portraying one, magic happens.”
Reigns returned to WWE television in August 2020 with a new attitude and aligned himself with Heyman shortly afterward. The partnership became the foundation of The Tribal Chief era, separating Reigns from the heavily pushed “Big Dog” presentation that had received a divided response from fans.
Wrestling
