John Cena isn’t pretending his first run in Hollywood was better than it actually was. Looking back at those early movies, Cena flat-out admitted they “sucked”—and says part of the problem was that he would rather have been wrestling.
While speaking with Conan O’Brien, Cena reflected on his difficult transition from WWE into acting after Conan noted that his first movie wasn’t a commercial success and the projects that followed didn’t immediately turn things around. Cena admitted that countless people and opportunities played a role in eventually getting him where he is today. But when it came to the part he could control, he put the blame on himself.
“What can I control and what can I learn from my experiences? The reason those movies—or the reason I can control that those movies sucked—I wasn’t wholeheartedly invested. I wanted to be in the ring.”
At 27 years old, sitting around a quiet movie set for 15 hours simply couldn’t compete with performing in front of thousands of screaming WWE fans. So he just wasn’t as invested in making movies.
“Because as a 27-year-old, spending 15 hours a day to watch one thing blow up in a library-quiet set is not near as cool as being in an arena in Lexington with 22,000 people going apes*** to be like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ and then you drive to the next town and do it again. Like, I wanted to be there. My focus was elsewhere.”
Cena eventually got another opportunity with Trainwreck, but by then his mindset had completely changed. He knew his first attempt at Hollywood hadn’t worked, so he decided that if he was going back, he needed to give acting the same commitment he gave WWE.
“By the time I auditioned for Trainwreck, I was like, ‘Hey, you’ve already been run out of the movie business once and you’re also doing okay. You have other things going on.’”
Instead of worrying about maintaining the tough-guy image people knew from wrestling, the Leader of Cenation went into the audition willing to embarrass himself and become the joke if that made the scene better.
““That’s exactly what I did in that audition. I’m sitting with very funny people. I have no business being there. But I didn’t give a fuck and just let it go and realize that, like, I was the joke in many cases. So, I didn’t put the roadblock in front of myself like, ‘I can’t laugh at myself because I’m cool,’ and that. Like, let’s go. Let’s make the funniest, coolest thing.”
Cena’s first Hollywood run came while his heart was still inside a wrestling ring, and he isn’t rewriting that part of his career now that he’s become a successful actor. His early movies didn’t work, he knows it, and by his own admission, one reason was pretty simple—he wasn’t giving Hollywood everything he had.
What do you make of Cena admitting his early movies “sucked” because he wasn’t fully invested in acting? Let us know in the comments.
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