12 Most INSANE Things Wrestlers Have EVER Said On AEW TV

9. The Cody Rhodes Exit Interview

Nobody expected Cody Rhodes to jump ship from AEW. Why would anybody agree to work with Vince McMahon and leave the “Ellis Island” of professional wrestling - particularly the guy who nicknamed it that?

So, when Cody claimed to be working without a contract in January 2022, nobody took him seriously. He was doing inscrutable, maniacal stuff every week as part of the ‘Codyverse’ on a weekly basis; his last, infamous promo just felt like an extension of a mysterious odyssey that nobody understood.

In that last promo, Cody basically built a feud with CM Punk that wasn’t in the plans. At all. He praised Punk and his comeback, but made sure to mention that he had in fact done everything that Punk had only fantasised about doing. This felt like a veiled message to Tony Khan driven by a fractured ego. Was Cody jealous about Punk’s top billing? Was he using his leverage for a new deal on live television? Or had he already left?

Cody has since explained to Sam Roberts that the promo was “selfish”, and he cut it to remind everybody of his importance to the company. But it gets wilder than that.

Cody has deemed it his “AEW exit interview”. He exited AEW, of course, to join WWE - which he indirectly buried twice. Even though he was going there (!).

First, he rubbished NXT as “developmental”, mocking its “hip toss class”, and then he mocked WWE’s practise of renaming wrestlers when saying Brody King had “balls” for not changing his own. “We’re not in the business of renaming people like Gunner McGillabuddy or whatever the hell it is,” Cody said, referencing Gunther.

He used Brodie Lee as a bridge to get to the TNT title, a match for which he was meant to be promoting, but not before suggesting that the contract for that match against Sammy Guevara was “maybe not the contract” he wanted. Did he want to leave? Had he left?

Perhaps this was the day Cody Rhodes was never less certain.