Stephanie McMahon opened up about her long-running struggle with playing a babyface during a recent conversation with Paul Heyman on her podcast What’s Your Story With Steph McMahon, offering a candid look at why portraying the good guy never suited her.

Stephanie admitted she never enjoyed stepping into the role. “This is why I hate being a babyface,” she said. “I think of myself as a baby face in real life. Maybe I’m not, but to be out there as a baby face is so tough. It’s so much easier to be a heel. It’s so much more fun… I hate it. Terrible. Despise it.” Her comments set the tone for a wider discussion with Heyman about the demands and expectations placed on performers when they are meant to be the heroic figure.

Heyman shared that the pressure is relentless when playing the good guy. “As a baby face, you have to be completely conscious that at every minute you’re wearing out your welcome… And people are not inclined to like anything… especially not people who are asking for you to like them.” He later contrasted this with the freedom of being a villain. “But as a heel, you can do no wrong, anything, anything, you can completely screw up totally and just sit there and say, you’ve interrupted my train of thought… It’s the easiest thing in the world. You can’t screw up as a heel.”

Stephanie also looked back on the reactions she drew during some of her most notorious heel periods, recalling chants that followed her from city to city. “My most like horrifying was, she’s got side meat… So mean… Chicago was ‘she’s a crack whore.’ Most everywhere else, it was ‘slut’… as soon as I turned heel, and it was so great.”

She recalled the first time she heard that chant as if it were yesterday. “It was at Armageddon, which was December of 99… the night that I did the heel turn and got with Paul [Triple H] in storyline… the next day… they came with the slut chant. And it was the greatest thing I had ever heard, because nobody else got chanted at that way, like, slut. I was like, what are they? Fantastic arenas of people, 1000s of people chanting slut at me. It’s the best. That’s the greatest. I mean, who could say that? Not many people.”