The Man has (finally) come back around to WWE. After stepping away from wrestling for nearly a year, Becky Lynch made her triumphant return at WrestleMania, where she teamed with fellow Irishwoman and protégé, Women’s Intercontinental Champion Lyra Valkyria, to capture the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championships.
“I took what I thought was going to be three months off during the summer, when my contract came up,” Lych says of her absence. “I was like, ‘Okay, seems like a good time to take a little break, get some stuff done.’ Then other things came up – I was filming ‘Star Trek,’ and then ‘Happy Gilmore.’ There was talk [of a return] around Rumble time, but then at the last minute, I got a skin condition. The next big event was WrestleMania, so it seemed to make sense, especially if I could take Bayley out of the mix and ruin her dreams. It felt doubly brilliant.”
A week after WrestleMania, Lynch took to the ring on “Monday Night Raw” and gleefully confessed to attacking Bayley so she could replace her as Valkyria’s Mania tag team partner. Though Lynch and Bayley are 2/4s of an informal group of wrestlers known as “The Four Horsewomen,” she says fans overestimate how close they actually are.
“When we were coming up, ‘The Four Horsewomen,’ we were never a close alliance,” she explains. “When you talk about ‘The Four Horsewomen,’ it’s not like we were a faction. We were ambitious women who wanted to change the game, change how things were done, and be seen as the biggest stars in wrestling, regardless of gender.”
Even in their early days at NXT, Lynch says she felt Bayley didn’t have the same win-at-all-costs mentality as the other Horsewomen. “That was most of our ambition. Bayley just wanted to be liked as much as possible. I beat her up in 2014, and people loved it. In 2019, she hit me in the back with a chair, and we have not been in any way friendly since. In fact, we’ve been rivals in some capacity.”
“Twice I’ve been called to join a War Games team I had no business being in, because people wanted me to handle Bayley and they knew that I could,” Lynch adds. “Now everybody’s so shocked that I attacked the woman that I’ve been fighting for years? By the way, ‘Damage CTRL’ controlled zero damage. Precisely zero damage was controlled. Mission failed, because Bayley fails at most missions.”
At first, it seemed like Lynch’s plan went off without a hitch: she successfully took Bayley out of action and replaced her as Lyra Valkyria’s tag team partner, taking tag titles off longtime rivals Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez. Unfortunately for Lynch, Morgan and Rodriguez were granted a rematch the following night on “Monday Night Raw,” where Valkyria slipped up, costing herself and Lynch the tag titles after less than 24 hours with the gold.
“Lyra undoes all of my work, loses the very next day after I made her a double champ,” Lynch says. “What does anyone expect from me? Of course I’m gonna flip the lid.”
Lynch is no stranger to what it takes to be a double champion: in 2019, she made history in the main event of WrestleMania as the first woman to hold both the Raw and SmackDown Women’s Championships simultaneously. As a perfectionist with a championship-caliber pedigree, Lynch doesn’t appreciate Valkyria ruining her triumphant return.
“I’m the greatest female professional wrestler of all time, that’s not just me saying it,” boasts Lynch. “There’s documented evidence, Sports Illustrated put out a list. Lyra was nowhere on that list. Then there was a ‘20 Greatest WWE Wrestlers of All Time,’ and of course, I was on that list. No other woman was on it, but I was.”
Tensions boiled over, and the match was officially made: mentor versus protégé for the Intercontinental Title at “Backlash.” On a recent episode of “Monday Night Raw,” Valkyria told Lynch she already “knows [she’s] a better wrestler than [her],” and that she hopes she’s going to be a better person too. Lynch takes issue with the Champion’s assessment of their situation.
“Let’s look at Lyra’s track record,” Lynch insists. “Let’s dive into this, actually, because Lyra was talking about how she’s a better wrestler than me, but the first two matches after she won the Intercontinental Title, she lost. She lost those matches! What are you talking about? You’re the best? You should have given up that title. That woman should be embarrassed. She should be sitting with her head in her hands, crying.”
“Then she goes and saddles up beside Bayley, decides that she’s going to be her tag team partner going into WrestleMania, without considering me,” she continues. “I tried to be nice, I tried to be good, I tried to help her. I came back, I did all the nice things, even though this was kind of simmering in the back of my head. Now that you’re bringing it up, that simmer is getting to a boil. When I say it out loud, it’s really insane how much I’ve been wronged.”
As for whether or not their relationship is salvageable, Lynch says the ball is in Valkyria’s court.
“That would be on her,” Lynch says. “When you think about it, I’m really the one that’s been attacked time and again. She’s been coming out here and attacking my character, telling me what a horrible human being I am. I haven’t done the same to her. I’ve said she’s misguided, that she fell under the wrong influence. I have said that she is ungrateful and disrespectful, which she is, but I have not attacked her character in the same way that she has attacked mine.”
Her expectations for reconciliation? “If she is willing to get down on her knees and apologize and say ‘I’m so sorry, Becky, I realize you’re the greatest of all time. I realize how wonderful you are. I realize I would have nothing in my life if it wasn’t for you. Thank you for every morsel of food that I eat, because I get to eat that with the money that I make from wrestling, which I wouldn’t make if it wasn’t for you following your dream. Thank you for everything you’ve sacrificed and suffered through to allow me to have a dream that I can make come true. And for taking me under your wing, to do it in the way that I’ve done it, which is successful, but not as successful as you, Becky. I will never be as successful as you.’”
Regardless of what her relationship with Valkyria looks like after “Backlash,” Lynch is ready and willing to defend her title when she becomes the new Women’s Intercontinental Champion.
“A lot of NXT wrestlers have come up to ‘Raw.’ Giulia, Stephanie [Vaquer] and Roxanne [Perez], they’re all newer,” Lynch explains. “Sure, let them bask in my presence. If they want to step up, I will decide an appropriate time and place, and I will take them on and show them how much more they have to learn. They’ll get better from it, because you learn more in defeat than you’ll ever learn from a win.”
Though Lynch is used to schooling wrestlers in the ring, she was excited to watch pros at work in a different medium: acting. In December 2024, Lynch revealed she’d joined the cast of the upcoming “Star Trek” series “Starfleet Academy.”
“I’m not sure how much I can give away, other than it was an amazing experience,” she says. “I’m on the bridge crew, and filming on the bridge, it was one of the most amazing sets I’ve ever been on. Alex Kurtzman, the director and writer, is such a wonderful person to work with and learn from. Paul Giamatti is there, Holly Hunter. Just being in their presence, learning from them, working opposite them, was amazing.”
Though she wasn’t a diehard fan before boarding the series, Lynch says she came up in a “Trek”-loving household. “I grew up when ‘Star Trek’ was one of the two shows that was on TV in Ireland, on whatever four channels we had, so it was always on in the background. I can’t say that I sat down and watched, but I did love the movies. And Colm Meaney. We all love Colm Meaney, any time he was on, you sit down and watch that.”
As the newest member of the vast “Star Trek” universe, Lynch was in turn able to introduce her own family, husband (fellow WWE wrestler Seth Rollins), and 4-year-old daughter Roux, to the world of “Trek.” “They came to set one day. Roux was a little overwhelmed by the size of everything, I think, but it was awesome.”
“Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” was one of several projects Lynch tackled while on a break from wrestling. In January, she took to Instagram to reveal a surprise role in “Happy Gilmore 2,” which arrives on Netflix July 25.
“That cast is insane,” she says. “The world I got to play in was ridiculous and wonderful and incredibly fun. The time on that set was amazing, seeing Adam Sandler and how he conducts himself as such a star in that word, but also so kind to everybody. The atmosphere and tone that he sets on set is unbelievable, and then he’s jumping in, rewriting stuff, helping the director. He’s doing everything, it’s incredible to watch.”
Lynch isn’t the only professional wrestler in “Happy Gilmore 2.” All Elite Wrestling’s Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF) also has a role in the film. As for whether or not she crossed paths with MJF on set? “I did. You know, a very nice boy. Great chats. Of course, he knows he’d lose at [a promo battle], but we had great chats. Unfortunately, it was way before this happened, but I feel like he would completely agree with everything that I’m saying about Lyra.”
“Starfleet Academy” and “Happy Gilmore 2” aren’t Lynch’s first forays into acting. She graduated from the Dublin Institute of Technology with a theatre arts degree in 2012, worked as a stunt performer on “Vikings” prior to WWE fame, and even appeared as wrestling aficionado Cyndi Lauper in an episode of “Young Rock.”
“I love the collaboration of it, that’s what it comes down to,” she says of the acting world. “The creative collaboration, that you get to work with and bounce ideas off of different people and see them come to life, that you get to try things. In wrestling, it’s a live medium, so you get one shot to make it. Thankfully, I’m a one-take kind of gal.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
