Finn Balor Looks Back at Bullet Club’s Formation: ‘I Wanted To Have Fun’

Finn Balor was a founding member of the Bullet Club, and he recently recounted the group’s origins. Balor formed the group as Prince Devitt in NJPW in 2013 when he turned on Ryusuke Taguchi and teamed up with Karl Anderson, Tama Tonga, and Bad Luck Fale.

The group of course went on to become one of the most expansive factions in wrestling, with unofficial “spinoffs” like The Club in WWE, Bullet Club Gold (aka the Bang Bang Gang) in AEW and more. The Elite came out of the group and helped form AEW in 2019. Balor spoke about the group’s formation in an interview on Insight With Chris Van Vliet and you can see the highlights below:

On If He Knew At the Time How Big the Bullet Club Would Be:

“No, not at all. I just wanted to have fun, and originally Bullet Club wasn’t supposed to be Bullet Club, it was supposed to be just me and [Bad Luck] Fale. So I’d been a babyface for six years in New Japan, they wanted to turn me heel, and that was one thing then that made me stay in New Japan. So I was kind of thinking about, ‘Oh, maybe it’s time to try WWE now, I’ve done everything in New Japan that I felt like I could possibly achieve.’ But then the idea came. ‘Hey, would you like to turn heel?’ I was like ‘Oh, this is something new, now I can be a heel in New Japan. I can learn more.’ So that’s kind of what made me stay, and within like two weeks of having the conversation of putting me and Fale together, it was Gedo’s idea, who was the booker at the time, said, ’Hey, you’re always with Karl Anderson, you’re always with Tama. You guys are always together, why don’t we make you guys a group, come up with a name?”

On Coming Up With the Name:

“So I kind of went to the three guys and said, ‘Hey, do you guys have any ideas for the name?’ They said, ‘Nah, you deal with that, dude. That’s your department.’ So I went home, brainstormed a couple different names, landed on Bullet Club. Once I turned heel, I think it was crazy, because we had so much heat. I remember Fale would be carrying me out on his shoulders at Korakuen Hall, and he kind of had to walk through the crowd, and there’d be fans hitting me in the leg, punching me in the leg, giving me dead legs, and then those fans, so many fans, were calling the office to complain about Prince Devitt cheating to win matches that they had to set up a separate phone line to take complaints. Because there’s so much respect, and I guess it wasn’t something that was done commonly, or at least recently in New Japan. So that was like lightning in a bottle, and it was such a short run for me in Bullet Club, but I look back on it super fondly.”