Daniel Bryan was recently featured on Jimmy Jacobs’ podcast “Jimmy Jacobs Doesn’t Know” and Jacobs has an in-depth talk with his longtime friend about several topics including how he became interested in wrestling, the experience of achieving popularity and notoriety in wrestling and more.
Daniel Bryan on what drew him to pro wrestling:
“You know what, it’s weird. I don’t know. I think because I was a sick kid, like really sick, that I was drawn to the magic of the superheroes. I had been really sick and my family weren’t even wrestling fans.
There was this new kid at school who was my best friend’s friend that apparently they did soccer or swimming or something together and anyways, he just came to my school (this was when I was in first grade) and he came back to my house and he had this backpack and he’s like, ‘I got a secret to show you guys, but you have to promise not to tell anybody.’ And we were both like, ‘Oooo, what is it?’ And he pulled out these wrestling magazines as if they were like Playboys or something, you know what I mean?
And like I just poured over them and as somebody who, I’ve always been an avid reader because like when I was sick, I would just read a lot, and so he left me some of the magazines and I just like would look at them and you see these pictures of these ‘super men’ and at the time women too, but it’s like, ‘Wow, the masks and these things’ and it’s like, ‘Whoa what is this world?’ And then I slowly started getting sucked in and my parents would buy me the magazines sometimes and then they took me to a show and then when I went to the show, it just like, it blew my mind.”
On how it felt to be in the midst of wanting to be a wrestler and being the most important wrestler in the world:
“It felt like nothing. That’s the interesting thing. It’s one of the things, I’ve always been fascinated by my own experience in wrestling so people think different things about what you experience yourself when you’re doing this performance and what you’re doing this thing. That period was incredible. When I would come down and do the ‘Yes’ chants and the whole arena was doing it with me, sometimes I would feel like this out-of-body experience when I was looking down at the whole thing and it was almost like, ‘Oh, this is crazy that my life is this. Like, what has happened, that this is happening to me?’ Wrestling is just weird. It’s a weird thing to do and a weird thing to love and it’s a weird thing to like be apart of, but like you’re out there and I’m by no means an actor, right? Like if you were to tell me hey do this scene over here with somebody and be this way, I would be like, ‘I’m not good at that.’
Like what I do is almost more like method acting where I embody something while I’m out there and doing it. And then sometimes while I’m out there I leave the embodiment of this character like outside and just look at it like, ‘This is crazy man…like what am I doing?’ It’s really, really weird, but then it’s also when I get to the back, it’s a feeling as if like, ‘That was really cool. Okay, now I’m just gonna go pet my dog.’ But it never has ever had the ability to stick with me past feeling it in the moment.”
Read More: Daniel Bryan’s ‘Failure’ Threatens All Tag Teams, The Miz Regrets Letting Shane McMahon Slip Away
