Jelly Roll recently appeared as a guest on the INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling and WWE.
During the discussion, the international music star and WWE super fan spoke about his WWE in-ring debut, his recent dramatic weight loss and how it led to him having a match.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts. Also embedded below is a complete video archive of the discussion.
On giving Austin Theory a chokeslam at SummerSlam: “Which was all Austin Theory. But once again, the greatest heels make the babyfaces look incredible. That’s all Austin. I mean, that dude’s a seller and a half. But he was the dude I wanted to Undertaker style it, you know, because that’s what I grew up watching. Throw the arm over, kind of like I did Logan in the actual match. Thank you Taker for giving me that nod. But when I went to it, Austin was like, ‘One arm, it will get higher.’ I was like, You sure? He was like, ‘Trust me, bro.’ This is like breaking all kayfabe, straight shoot. He looks at me and goes, ‘My brother, I’m going to jump through the building. I got you dog.’ Because I was so nervous. I made him make us work it out on a crash pad 30 times. They were so over it, him and The Miz, but they were so patient with me. They were like, it’s this easy. And me and Ron Killings are homies. So he was just back there laughing. He’s like, Jelly, I swear you’re gonna be fine. I was like, okay.”
On how the spot led to a match: “Well, I’m walking up into Gorilla, and I’m obviously losing my mind. I’m definitely a very inflated version of myself, and I see Triple H, and I’m like, ‘Triple H, I got to do this again. I got to take a match, bro. I’m gonna go lose 100 pounds and come back and take a match.’ For the record, I had had a big disconnect between what 100 pounds was gonna feel like and how much I actually needed to lose. That’s a whole different story. But I was in my mind, I’m all jacked up on Mountain Dew. I’m like, Dude, I’m coming back. We’re gonna do this, man. And what I love about Triple H is he’s very direct, he’s serious, but he’s sincere. There’s a real sincerity in his face. You see the seriousness. But I think you got to look at his eyes are sincere. His face is serious. His eyes are sincere. And I seen them eyes, they really soften. He shook my hand. He said, ‘Brother, you lose that weight, you got a home here.’”
On why was 100 pounds the number: “I guess in my mind, it was like a realistic shot, I should be able to lose 100 pounds in a year. I’ve already lost 50 or 60 pounds in this amount of time. I don’t know what I was thinking, Chris, I was just doing screwball math. You know what I mean? I was just gassing myself into just shooting my shot.”
On what was his heaviest: “I was 540.”
On what he’s at now: “285. I feel really, really good about it.”
On how that led to the match: “Before Wrestlemania in Las Vegas, I’d already got down like 60 or 70 pounds, and I started looking at it as a God thing, man. I travel like 300 days a year. I travel so hard that my management this year was very intentional about giving me more time off. So they had booked the entire month of July off for me, except for this one thing, where I was going to host Kimmel for a couple days, and I was going to have the whole month off, and I was going to stay here and write my album, because I hadn’t wrote in a year. I’ve been just taking time off writing to just allow life to happen. I started calling management January, and was like, ‘Hey, man, I think I’m going to be able to use July to wrestle at SummerSlam like I told Triple H I wanted to do.’ And as you can imagine, management was so against it. Nobody on my team was cheering for this to be a reality. You know, that’s another fun thing to talk about. But I talked to management, they’re just like, ‘Hey, man, you know, it’s gonna cost you a lot of money. You got time to write. You’re always complaining about not having time with your family. Have you ran this by your wife?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I prayed about it, I talked to my wife and kids. They’ll come see me in Orlando.’ I was like, I want to move down there and just move to the PC for the month. This is January, and I’m like, I want to rent two houses, and I want to put a studio in one house, and I’ll write them up while I’m icing down every day, or see if my what my body can handle, because I didn’t know what I was going to be able to handle or not. And they were like, look, you know, keep thinking about it. Then as we get close to WrestleMania, I was like, Hey, man, if I’m going to do this at SummerSlam, what’s up? They were like, ‘Can you do a ring check the night of WrestleMania?’ I was like, no problem. I showed up, and I was like, what time is the ring check? They were like, ‘Can you wait till midnight?’ And I was like, ‘Yep, no problem.’ I stayed there and watched. I was going to watch the whole show anyways. And at midnight, I walked into that room with Bruce Pritchard and a couple of the producers, and I proved to him I could take a bump for about an hour and a half. I don’t want to say it was a rib, but they were definitely there to see if I had any bitching in me.”
