Roman Reigns Ceremony, Intercontinental Championship Match Booked for This Week’s WWE SmackDown

This week’s Friday Night SmackDown will see the fallout from Clash of Champions‘ emotional main event, as Roman Reigns will be “officially crowned as the Tribal Chief” following his WWE Universal Championship win over Jey Uso. WWE.com explained the segment as “After successfully defending his Universal Championship, Reigns will now be officially crowned the Tribal Chief in a ceremony presided over by Paul Heyman on SmackDown this Friday. The recognition comes on the heels of The Big Dog’s brutal victory over his cousin Jey Uso at WWE Clash of Champions. What will Reigns have to say about his vicious actions? And will the rest of the legendary Anoa’i family simply accept the champion’s crowning?”

Elsewhere on the show Sami Zayn will defend his Intercontinental Championship against the previous champ Jeff Hardy. Kevin Owens will also appear on the show (via the brand-to-brand invitational) in order to host an edition of The KO Show where he’ll have Alexa Bliss explain her relationship with The Fiend.

This week Reigns appeared on the Load Management podcast, where he explained the inspiration behind his new heel persona. According to him, the character is partially based off Daniel Day-Lewis’ Billy “The Butcher” Cutting from the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York.

“I can’t say that I really built it around anyone within the industry,” Reigns said. “If anything, more [from] movies. It’s hard because in a weird way, I’m sure you guys have seen Gangs of New York, The Butcher. In his mind, there is a bad element to him. but he’s the native, he’s the one that’s from America. I like those type of characters to where there’s a justification, in their own mind at least, to what they’re doing.

“For me and the character that I’m trying to portray going forward is not everybody on our roster is going to be able to understand where I’m coming from and the reason that I’m doing it because they’re not in the position that I’m in,” he continued. “They’re not in that boss role, that top-of-the card role, and if they are they haven’t been there as long as I have. So of course they’re not going to be able to understand. But there are some justifications and a lot of rationalizing that this character is going to go through to convince himself that he’s right, even when he is wrong. I’ll have conviction going forward.”