Jelly Roll Reflects on Achieving a Lifelong Dream With His Match at WWE SummerSlam, How He Prepared

In a recent appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, music artist Jelly Roll discussed what led to his tag team match at WWE SummerSlam 2025. At the premium live event, Jelly Roll teamed up with Randy Orton against Drew McIntyre and Logan Paul.

Jelly Roll explained the extreme training regimen he underwent at the WWE Performance Center and achieving a lifelong dream with his WWE in-ring debut. Below are some highlights:

Jelly Roll on what led to his WWE SummerSlam 2025 match

“Before Wrestlemania in Las Vegas, I’d already got down like 60 or 70 pounds, and I started looking at it as a God thing, man. I travel like 300 days a year. I travel so hard that my management this year was very intentional about giving me more time off. So they had booked the entire month of July off for me, except for this one thing, where I was going to host Kimmel for a couple days, and I was going to have the whole month off, and I was going to stay here and write my album, because I hadn’t wrote in a year. I’ve been just taking time off writing to just allow life to happen. I started calling management January, and was like, ‘Hey, man, I think I’m going to be able to use July to wrestle at SummerSlam like I told Triple H I wanted to do.’ And as you can imagine, management was so against it. Nobody on my team was cheering for this to be a reality. You know, that’s another fun thing to talk about. But I talked to management, they’re just like, ‘Hey, man, you know, it’s gonna cost you a lot of money. You got time to write. You’re always complaining about not having time with your family. Have you ran this by your wife?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I prayed about it, I talked to my wife and kids. They’ll come see me in Orlando.’ I was like, I want to move down there and just move to the PC for the month. This is January, and I’m like, I want to rent two houses, and I want to put a studio in one house, and I’ll write them up while I’m icing down every day, or see if my what my body can handle, because I didn’t know what I was going to be able to handle or not. And they were like, look, you know, keep thinking about it. Then as we get close to WrestleMania, I was like, Hey, man, if I’m going to do this at SummerSlam, what’s up? They were like, ‘Can you do a ring check the night of WrestleMania?’ I was like, no problem. I showed up, and I was like, what time is the ring check? They were like, ‘Can you wait till midnight?’ And I was like, ‘Yep, no problem.’ I stayed there and watched. I was going to watch the whole show anyways. And at midnight, I walked into that room with Bruce Pritchard and a couple of the producers, and I proved to him I could take a bump for about an hour and a half. I don’t want to say it was a rib, but they were definitely there to see if I had any bitching in me.”

On not having any formal training before getting ready for his match

“I knew nothing. I’d done some stuff whenever I was a kid, we had a wrestling ring from DOA, had a spot in Laverne that we’d go to when I was like 10-11, it was so sick, dude. I’d go jump off the top rope on crash pads. But I hadn’t really properly trained at all. I knew nothing about it. I just understood it from being a fan, which is way disconnected from the physicality of it, by the way, we are all grossly underestimating how much all of that hurts. So I mean, I knew I’d be good with the mic, and I knew I could get the storytelling side, you know what I mean, but I wasn’t sure if I could do the physical side. And that’s what they were worried about.”

Jelly Roll on his main goals for the WWE SummerSlam match

“It was a three-part thing. It was very personal to me, like a lifelong dream. Selfishly, Chris, it’s hard to admit it this honestly, but I’m an honest guy; it was a chance of a lifetime that I thought I had to do, and it was I had to do it. You grow up watching it like I did, and dreaming of it, and then add the component that I came from being so morbidly obese. There’s a moment where I fall down when I chokeslam Austin Theory, and we do the five knuckle shuffle that I fall down, and I am struggling. I’m so fat, I’m struggling to get back up that The Miz and R-Truth come over and help me. I have The Miz on this arm, and I have R-Truth under my other arm, while that arm’s holding a rope. I was so fat that the SummerSlam, before Logan Paul threw me on a table. I was so fat one year before that, it took two grown men and a steel cable rope to get me up from one move down, and one year later, I came back and took a suplex, two snap back bumps, chops. I mean, I took bumps, that is all a part of the story. For me, it was proving that I could do that, like that being a North Star. Two, wrestling is so cool right now. Why is it not being explored in pop culture? That was frustrating me a little bit. When it did make pop culture was always for the wrong headlines because the celebrity involved didn’t commit, or whatever the case may have been. So I was like, Dude, there’s a chance we could actually bleed this thing back into the streets like wrestling used to be, we might be able to blur the lines. We were having conversations early of how Drew’s disgusted by me being there. How real that can feel or not feel, Logan and me really feeling tense. Also, can we take the storyline to Kimmel? Can we take it to ESPN? Can we take it to, like, pop culture? I thought I could bring that to the table a little bit. You know what I mean? Was like, a real big part of it too, was like, almost like, wanting to be one of the guys blowing the trumpet for like, Yo, y’all are missing one of the greatest shows in the world right now. Then I think the third part was, I wanted to see if it was something I could do, and if I could do it, and was able to do it, would I be able to do it again?”

The tag match at WWE SummerSlam saw the heel team of Logan Paul and Drew McIntyre pick up the win over Jelly Roll and Randy Orton. Jelly Roll even took a Frog Splash from Logan Paul off the top rope through an announce table outside the ring for his troubles.

Despite the loss, Jelly Roll took things in stride, still appearing at the post-show broadcast after the event. The music artist also attended WWE Clash in Paris along with rapper Post Malone.