In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Look, John Cena already knows what you’re thinking—he’s heard it in every audition and meeting for the past 25 years. “You can’t deny a first impression,” the pro wrestler–turned–movie star says on his In the Envelope episode. “That’s why it’s been very difficult for me to try and seek out new levels of performance. You walk into a room, even if you’re in a suit, at 230 pounds, and everybody’s like: ‘Nope.’ You can only fit so many lanes.”
Cena has made an entire career out of figuratively and literally rolling with these kinds of punches. After a Division III All-American football stint didn’t pan out, his goal became a career in strength conditioning. When bodybuilding wasn’t paying the bills, the Marine Corps came calling. Then, an out-of-options desire to stay in California led Cena to accept a friend’s invitation to give pro wrestling a try. That last leap stuck; he spent the better part of a decade as the face—and top ticket seller—of global juggernaut World Wrestling Entertainment.
Cena, as you quickly learn in conversation, never half-assed it on the winding road to where he is today—and the exceedingly rare times that he did still haunt him. The project he brings up most over the course of our interview isn’t from the “Fast & Furious” franchise, or his corner of the DC Comics universe, or even his upcoming Warner Bros. comedy “Coyote vs. ACME.”
It’s “The Marine,” a WWE-produced action thriller from 2006, that Cena still regrets; it’s the one time he believes he didn’t give 110% of himself to a project. “I just didn’t have the wisdom or the knowledge or the perception to realize how big of an opportunity that was,” he says.
John Cena in “Peacemaker,” Courtesy HBO Max
So when Cena finally did commit to a full-time movie career, he viewed every role as an opportunity—not just to work, but to subvert the expectations of his massive physical frame that had originally pigeonholed him. He gravitated toward creative partners who wanted to use Cena’s size to build a character—comedic roles that used muscles as a way to project masculine fragility (“Trainwreck”) or fatherly vulnerability (“Blockers”). Memories of failure weren’t just the actor’s motivation for those Hollywood successes—they were his secret creative weapon.
“If I make a mistake on set, which I often do, I don't feel shame at all,” he says. “I expect people to give me the right feedback, like, ‘This sucked,’ or, ‘I’m looking for it more like this.’ I’m OK hearing that, because no one sees the one that sucked. Everyone sees the good one. But that takes guts. I have to fail in front of my crew. I have to fail in front of three cameras. I have to fail in front of my cast mates. But I’m not afraid to do that, because I’m just searching for that one gem.”
“If you’re willing to peel off more and we can get to the core of why [the character] is so physically fit, then you can have some substructure. Then you can really wow people.”
Recently, Cena found the perfect match of actor and role in Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker, the DC Comics antihero he first played in James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad”—and then again in his own eight-episode spinoff series on HBO Max, also created by Gunn. The filmmaker really gets what makes Cena unique onscreen: Peacemaker is all bluster and biceps on the surface, but his performance exudes insecurity.
“What I liked about Peacemaker is, maybe this guy has gotten in shape so much for reason X, and underneath it is this core thing,” Cena says. He saw shades of himself in the character. “I started lifting weights at 12 years old as a form of self-defense, because I got the crap kicked out of me all the time,” he remembers. “When I started getting sizable gains at 15, I didn’t become a meathead. I was, like, a weird meathead-nerd hybrid.”
Cena’s past became a core part of his character-building practice. “Why is Peacemaker such a dick? Because that’s the corner he’s painted his identity into,” he says. “He really isn’t. He really is someone who wants a group of people to love and to love him back.”
As he hops from one blockbuster franchise to the next—his podcast episode was recorded in the brief window before he boarded a London-bound plane to start shooting “Fast X”—that character work becomes more and more important to Cena.
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“That’s a lot of my process, getting to the ‘why,’ ” he says. “If the ‘why’ is simply: ‘I need you to be big,’ that’s OK. That’s cut and dried. But if you’re willing to peel off more and we can get to the core of why [the character] is so physically fit, then you can have some substructure. Then you can really wow people.”
Still, some days, that depth isn’t available; some roles require the build and the brawn, but not much else. But knowing he can do more now—that he’s still finding new ways to buck preconceived notions all these years later—is what keeps Cena going.
“If you get on set and talk with the director, and you’ve done all your work and you’ve found your ‘why,’ and the director says, ‘I just need you to be big’? Throw it away and just be big,” he says. “But at least you’ve got that ace in your back pocket.”
Listen and subscribe to In the Envelope to hear our full conversation with Cena: