Stephen Amell has been a friend of Cody Rhodes for quite some time, leading to the former Arrow star stepping inside the ring for multiple promotions alongside “The American Nightmare.” Amell was in Los Angeles this week for WWE’s WrestleMania 39 weekend, which was headlined by Rhodes challenging Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship. But despite it looking like Sunday night was going to be Rhodes’ crowning achievement, he actually wound up losing to Reigns inside SoFi Stadium thanks to heavy interference from The Bloodline.
But to make matters worse, WWE then turned around and tried to book Rhodes in a tag team match against Reigns and Solo Sikoa with Brock Lesnar as his tag team partner. However, Lesnar betrayed Rhodes just before the match started and proceeded to hand him a thunderous beatdown until the show went off the air. Amell clearly wasn’t a fan.
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Paul Levesque explained the thought process behind booking Rhodes to lose against Reigns during the WrestleMania post-show press conference — “What I will say about that is, it’s always interesting to me when people say, ‘how can that happen?’ or ‘how can they do that in that moment?’ It’s almost perfectly spelling out in this story. ‘I need to finish the story.’ In the WWE, the story never finishes. Tomorrow night on Raw, the story continues. The story takes another chapter. We just got to the end of the chapter. The story continues and that’s where this gets interesting to me. That is what is the most amazing thing about our business, the story never ends.”
“It’s not drag things out. It’s telling a story,” he later added. “Where do you want to go with the story and how do you want to get there? In the moment, you think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe.’ If you’re watching a movie and you thought every scene in the movie was the last scene in the movie, ‘I can’t believe they did that, worst movie ever.’ Oh wait, there’s more. How much do we weigh that out? Every single moment of every single day. Some days when I’m trying to sleep and I can’t sleep, it’s because I’m weighing that out in my brain and I wish that I could sleep. It’s all you think about and it consumes your every moment of everything you do. You feel it. Sometimes your feeling is wrong and sometimes your feeling is right. I do know that it always continues and the story doesn’t end here. Some people will look at it and say, ‘if you did this, it would have been better.’ You don’t know that, do you? You’re never going to know because if you did the other thing, it might not have worked out the way you wanted to. People might not have reacted the way you wanted to. It’s always feel and where you are at that moment, honestly, it’s the right place to be and that’s where you have to be and bank on what’s next. If you continue to tell the story and if I didn’t feel like we had a compelling story on the other side, it wouldn’t be the decision.”
