Paul Heyman Reveals He Came Up With Roman Reigns’ Tribal Chief Nickname, What Vince McMahon Wanted To Call Them Together

The Wise Man and Special Counsel, Paul Heyman, joined Insight with Chris Van Vliet for a fascinating, revealing interview.  During the conversation, Paul Heyman discussed his breakthrough pairing with reigning World Heavyweight Champion Roman Reigns in 2020, leading to the birth of Reigns’ era as The Tribal Chief. However, Heyman revealed that Vince McMahon wasn’t keen on the nickname he came up with for Reigns. Below are some highlights from Insight:

Paul Heyman on the Thinking Behind How He Looks at Roman Reigns

“Uninhibited, uncontroverted, absolute devotion under any and all circumstances. If the room is on fire, and he says we’re going to run through the flames to get to the other side. ‘Yes, my Tribal Chief, I will go with you, my Tribal Chief. For I believe in you to such an extent that if you say we’re going to run through the fire and go to the other side, I have absolutely no reason to doubt the fact that we’re going through on to the other side, my Tribal Chief, and I will light myself on fire for you, my Tribal Chief, to protect you from the flames, for you are my Tribal Chief, and I acknowledge you. My world is built around that acknowledgement.’

“It’s just devout worship, it’s blind devotion. It’s also the way, to be blunt, I used to see some people in a room when Vince would talk. It was just amazing to me that if you’re in the room and you’re not there to give a contrarian opinion, I don’t know what you’re in the room for. Because then you just inevitably become a yes man, so there were too many people, too many times that anything that Vince would say, it was never offering an opinion of, ‘Hey, that sounds great, and what if we did it this way too?’ Where’s your own input into it? In watching that, and in seeing other people, you know, just in Hollywood, do it too. Just, ‘Oh, that was so magnificent! Academy Award! Yes, yes! Oh, that was wonderful!’ It’s like, really?”

On How It Resembles Fear and Devotion

“Yes, and in many ways it is fear, but it’s also devotion. It’s also just an absolute worship, an absolute giving of oneself to the Tribal Chief, because you must. Because to be in the Tribal Chief’s orbit, to have the Tribal Chief’s attention, and to receive any acknowledgement. If you go back and you watch the time on the couch, he looked to me because he had to bring the camera to me; that was necessary. Once the Tribal Chief won the title. I told him, ‘Don’t look at me on the entrances. Hold out your hand for the championship and take the championship, but don’t [look at me]. Even when you call for the mic, don’t look at me, nothing. Don’t acknowledge me. Wait till I earn it. Give me a few months of service to the Tribal Chief, service to the cause of the Tribal Chief, service to the Island of Relevancy, service to The Bloodline.

“Then I will have earned my stripes enough for the Tribal Chief to say, ‘Thank you, Wiseman.’ That’s it. A lot of times he does. He looked this way, and I’m over and say, ‘Wiseman?’ And I come over his shoulder. ‘Yes, my Tribal Chief?’ And he wouldn’t look at me, because for the Tribal Chief to look at you, you have to earn that. It’s a matter of placing him above God, and if you can create that deity above the deity, then you have firmly established that’s the sun around which everything else orbits, that’s the energy in the room, that’s the oxygen that we all crave, and if you, and if you position him in that way, then it just makes him so much more of a bigger star.”

On Vince McMahon Doubting the Tribal Chief Nickname

“Well, you know, it’s just the little things that go into it. The first time I came up with Tribal Chief, [Vince said] ‘Really? You want to call him the Tribal Chief?’”

On What McMahon Wanted to Call Roman Reigns’ Alliance With Paul Heyman

“Oh, The Big Dog, Roman Reigns, with his advocate, Paul Heyman. I said, ‘Well, I can’t be his advocate as Brock Lesnar’s advocate. We have to have something different to Roman Reigns, and Roman Reigns has to be different. You got to pull the trigger on this. This has to be as much of a seismic shift as The Deadman becoming The American Badass. This is a whole new character. This is a whole new persona, and he could not have played this persona earlier because he was too young to do it. He needed to weather the storms to become the Tribal Chief. We grew up with him, almost like he was a child star, in that we saw him from his young days, fresh out of college, and he grew into this Tribal Chief.”

Paul Heyman currently appears as the onscreen manager for The Vision, along with the “retired” Brock Lesnar, in WWE.