Seth Rollins On Vince McMahon's "Eye For An Eye" Match Role, His Initial Reaction To The Stipulation

Seth Rollins recently spoke with Alex McCarthy of talkSPORT and confirmed that WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon had a role in the production of the recent "Eye For An Eye" match against Rey Mysterio at WWE's "The Horror Show at Extreme Rules" pay-per-view.

It was reported after the match, via PWInsider, that Vince was very hands-on with production of the first-ever bout, which ended with Rollins winning by "extracting the eyeball" of Mysterio. It was also reported that WWE filmed an entire sequence that would have made it look like Mysterio's eye popped out of the socket. The spot used prosthetic makeup, and this moment was originally scripted to be what caused Rollins to vomit at ringside. Vince reportedly hated the look of the special effect, and the sequence, and made the call to edit it out of the final broadcast.

Rollins confirmed that there were multiple finishes to the match, but said Vince played next to no part in the actual in-ring aspect. He revealed that the in-ring action was done by himself, Mysterio and WWE Producer Jamie Noble.

"A lot of the time, Vince says, 'Here's what we want to do' and he gives us the ball and let us figure out how to take it to the end zone," Rollins said. "Again, when the idea was presented to me, I was aghast. I thought it was ridiculous and a bit of a joke.

"But the more I thought about it and the more it came to pass I was like, 'OK, this will be different.' And it can be good and we don't have to scoff at everything right out of the gate ? I don't want to be that person. Vince wasn't as hands on as people think that he was. If I'm going to break the fourth wall here, so to speak, it was really 99.9% myself, Rey Mysterio and Jamie Noble."

Rollins continued and said they ended up going with the finish that they thought would make the most sense. He said he was "pretty proud" of the match.

"At the end of the day, you had Vince who made the final call on what the last shot was going to look like and that's pretty much it," Rollins said. "There was a couple of versions of what that final shot would look like and we went with the one that we thought made the most sense. It was a joint-decision on everybody's behalf.

"So at the end of the day, it was a product that I was pretty proud of. It was the first time I'd been able to be out there in the ring with a legend like Rey Mysterio for an extended period of time and, like I said, we had a really good wrestling match with a provocative finish and I was not upset about it one bit."

Rollins said he was caught off guard by the stipulation when it was first explained to him. He also talked about how he prepared for the match.

"Obviously it's a match that has never been done before," Rollins said. "I think people maybe tuned in out of morbid curiosity to see what would happen. I certainly did not expect to be in that match at any point leading up to it. When the stipulation was given to me, I was definitely caught off guard and didn't even really know how to prepare for it.

"I've watched back a fair amount of Rey Mysterio matches over my lifetime and going into the match I tried to study First Blood matches because that was kind of the only thing and the only match type that I could understand was akin to an eye-for-an-eye match. I went back and studied some of those matches and saw how they were and how they went and stuff like that, so going into the eye-for-an-eye match, I knew it was going to be a mix of us trying to gauge each other's eyes out and getting one another in a position to do such a thing which would involve some actual professional wrestling."

The Monday Night Messiah also discussed the reaction to the match and what they accomplished with it.

"At the end of the day, was it ideal? No. Did it catch people's attention? Sure. It ended up on TMZ," Rollins said. "I think we sort of accomplished what wrestling wants to accomplish and that is we told a very interesting story and there was some outside interest in the finish even though it was very weird ? and that's OK.

"I think pro wrestling can just be one-on-one, hold-for-hold wrestling or it can be storytelling like any other form of television and I think that when you start to look at it too critically, especially stuff like that? I dunno, to me it reeks of 2020 trying to pick everything apart. If you like the Lake of Reincarnation in AEW but you hate the eye-for-an-eye match? you know what I mean? Then where are we really at here?"