If you spend any time on the set of a major studio movie, you recognize that one key ingredient in the whole filmmaking process is patience. There is a lot of repetition, with multiple takes are respectively executed from different angles, and there is a whole lot of time in between setups as different departments perform a variety of different tasks to ensure that everything on camera looks perfect. It’s not what you might expect from an outside perspective, and for John Cena first entering the business after becoming a star in the big and flashy world of WWE, it required a huge adjustment that made him question his future as an actor.
Cena is now well-known as a multi-faceted and talented performer (recently dubbed the GOAT of wrestlers-turned-actors by his The Suicide Squad/Heads Of State co-star Idris Elba), but in a new career retrospective interview from Vanity Fair, he explains that his first experience in movies – namely making 2006’s The Marine – was a deeply unsatisfying time. During that point in his career, he wasn’t familiar with the “hurry up and wait” nature of Hollywood, and it led to frustration:
When I went down to film The Marine in 2004 or [2005], gosh, I’d just gotten a fiery start in the WWE, I’m world champion, I’m going to a different town a night, 320 days a year, audiences just going nuts. And then I fly all the way to Australia to library silence to shoot one explosion a day. I hated it, and I hated it because I just wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t appreciate the patience of it.
In the video, John Cena’s reflection comes from discussion of his time making F9, in which he plays the brother of Vin Diesel’s Dom Torretto. Watching a clip from the blockbuster that sees his character get tackled by his co-star while he is flying on a zipline, he notes the precision that went into the construction of the action. It was something he understood and could appreciate as a veteran of the silver screen, but it evidently drove him a bit nuts early in his career.
The Peacemaker star doesn’t stop there, though. He makes a direct link between being patient and expressing gratitude, and he feels that he didn’t have enough of either in the mid-aughts. Rather than making films because he wanted to make films, he was just trying to boost his personal image as a wrestler, and he understands now that he wasn’t the best version of himself at the time. He continues,
When I reflect back on my career, I didn’t appreciate those opportunities. By the way, I did a lot of shitty movies, and that’s why I didn’t do movies for a while. I should’ve got run out of town. I didn’t appreciate it, I wanted to be elsewhere, and I was doing movies as a vehicle to sell more tickets for wrestling. That’s OK, but I wasn’t putting my heart where I needed to be, and that was in the character on the set and appreciating everybody’s role in the process.
This story obviously has a happy ending. Around 2015, he started to turn some heads with his skills, with a scene-stealing supporting turn in Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck being a big standout, and that was followed a few years later as he demonstrated range both with comedy (like 2018’s Blockers) and action-centric blockbusters (like 2018’s Bumblebee). His career has only gotten better and more exciting – his greatest work to date being in his collaboration with James Gunn playing Christopher Smith a.k.a. Peacemaker.
Speaking of which, the brand new Season 2 of Peacemaker has now launched, with the premiere debuting for HBO Max subscribers last week. The story promises a whole lot of insanity to come, and new episodes drop on the streaming service on Thursdays.