Miserable and fed up with his direction in the WWE, former Intercontinental champion Wade Barrett decided to not renew his contract and step away from the wrestling ring for good. Barrett joined Sam Roberts' podcast and talked about the risk he took by quitting wrestling, a passion he had been pursuing for 15 years:
“Absolutely it was a risk,” Barrett said on leaving wrestling to go into acting.
“I mean, it was a risk I needed to take. I hate to portray this as being a guy who wanted to leave WWE and go act in some movies and take it in that direction, but that absolutely wasn’t my plan. I left WWE because I was utterly miserable wrestling at the time and I needed to get away from the business.”
Roberts asked Barrett if he has any plans to return to the ring or if he's done with wrestling altogether:
"I think one of the things that happened to me in the last couple of years in the WWE where I realized how unhappy I was in that environment, was that I realized that I needed variety and balance in my life," stated Barrett
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"I shouldn't say never, but at this time a full-time wrestler with nothing else going on just doesn't appeal to me. I like having the balance in my life. I like being outside doing other things like hosting a show on Netflix, or shooting a movie, and then I am going to go do a little wrestling commentary or this sort of thing, and then I am going to go spend a week in Greece with my girlfriend, which I had just come back from. These things were not available for me while I was working for WWE on a full-time schedule and would never be available as you work full-time with WWE.
"So, the older I got the more I started to appreciate balance and variety in my life and once you get a taste of that returning and realize how happy it can make you it is very difficult to conceive giving that up again."