Cody Rhodes Says He Was Supposed to Have a Second Match With Stephen Amell

– During the second part of his appearance on The Ric Flair Show (transcript via wrestlinginc.com), Cody Rhodes spoke about how the Stardust character was to end and more. Here are the highlights…

On His Feud With Goldust: “It was never intended to be a WrestleMania match. Fastlane (2015) was it. I was in the ladder match in [WrestleMania 31] for the Intercontinental Championship. I had been informed as such. No, it was never meant to be beyond Fastlane. The way I look at it, Fastlane was a total dud. It was a total dud and people think, ‘oh, well, the finish got screwed up’. The finish didn’t get screwed up. The match just sucked and it’s just one of those nights where I kick myself to this day about it.”

On a Second Match With Stephen Amell and Ending The Stardust Character: “Goldust is Dustin’s character, so to be like a light version of him was probably a career nightmare and just terrible idea, perhaps, but the idea was when we got it was, ‘okay, he doesn’t have to be androgynous. He doesn’t have to be Goldust. You can be a super villain!’ [Rhodes responded], ‘oh, okay, I’ll be like Jim Carey [as] The Riddler and I’ll find myself a superhero and then I had the match with Stephen Amell, who’s on TV as a DC [character], he’s the damn Green Arrow as an actual superhero.’ So I was like, ‘this is perfect!’ And then, there was supposed to be another match. We had practices scheduled and we were going to be at Hell In A Cell and that match was supposed to be the end of Stardust. It was supposed to be, ‘if Stardust loses to The Green Arrow, he’ll return as Cody Rhodes’. And when that didn’t happen, that was one of the first, the first, kind of kick in the balls for me because [Flair] said something to me on the bus and I don’t know if [he remembers] it, but [he] mentioned that, I’m not going to say it because [he] said it to me, but basically [he] had said that I had outgrown the character. And I thought, ‘well, there’s kind of no end in sight and I don’t want a fan, if somebody says, ‘oh, that’s Cody Rhodes’ and they say, ‘who?’ because they know me as Stardust’. That would just break my heart, so that was part of my decision to peace out there at the end.”