During an appearance at the All-In 2025 business summit, Paul “Triple H” Levesque was asked if he believes it’s harder now for WWE to have characters like The Iron Sheik, playing on the geopolitical tension that existed at the time.
In response, the chief content officer stated:
I just think that if you stereotype somebody into a particular place, a lot of the world would rebel against that. Not in a positive way. And maybe sometimes people that have no real reason to have a position on either side of that, right?
The one thing about WWE is: we’re a fun reflection of the world. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be entertainment. It’s supposed to be fantastical. It’s supposed to let you come to an event for three hours and just turn off and enjoy entertainment and some type of representation of the world that is around you. But people get lost in it and they begin to take the representations too seriously sometimes.
The WWE Hall of Famer went on to describe his philosophy in booking heels in the current product, noting a level of justification in their actions:
I have a saying in what I do right now, as long as the bad guy, the heel, is justified somewhere in his mind that what he is doing is right, that leads to the best heel, right? Because if 90 percent of the world disagrees with you but you believe, ‘No, you’re all wrong. I see this and it is right.’ You can run down that road. You’re not just trying to be the, you know, the curly mustache, bad guy heel tying people to the railroad tracks.
It’s real. You feel it, and it’s real. And it’s why you want to get to that place, right or wrong, for most people.
Source: F4WOnline
Video of the conversation, which took place in September, is available courtesy of the summit’s YouTube channel and can be viewed below.