Superstar wrestler John Cena reveals why he’s stepping back from WWE
He’s a record 16-time world champion and some say the greatest pro wrestler ever. So why is WWE big man John Cena scaling back on his time in the ring when he’s still got millions of wrestling fans around the world calling his name?
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Every professional athlete at some point comes to a brutal and confronting realisation that their best sporting days are behind them.
But WWE superstar-turned-actor John Cena – a record 16-time world champion and some say the greatest pro wrestler ever – is realistic enough to know that he’s lost a step and he’d rather back away from the sport than short-change his millions of fans around the world.
After headlining a huge WWE Super Show-Down event at the MCG in late 2018, Cena wrestled just 8 matches last year, and while he’s tipped to appear at WrestleMania 36 in April, the so-called Cenation will have to get used seeing a lot less of their idol in the ring.
“I am going to be 43 this April,” says Cena.
“I also know that WWE fans are extremely passionate, but they are also extremely astute. They know when you are a little bit slower and they don’t like those performances. I am running the risk of being at that line in the sand where if I was still an everyday performer, whether I had these other opportunities or not, I would have to take an honest look at myself and say ‘hey man, maybe this is the time to scale back a lot’.
“So it’s not that I am gone, but this is a very humbling conversation that you have to have with yourself but I am at the point where it is essentially a younger man’s game.”
But that’s not to say that Cena is disaffected with or disconnected from the WWE family that his given him a global profile he has been able to parlay into a successful acting career.
Quite the contrary, even if he won’t be as visible as he has been in the past, he plans to keep working behind the scenes to help the next generation of wrestlers.
“You don’t know the amount of time I have spent in the WWE performance centre, talking to and trying to mentor the young and up-and-coming talent,” Cena says.
“I always receive and answer immediately text messages from (wrestling boss) Vince McMahon himself and/or current WWE superstars, people on the creative side of things wanting to run stuff by me or just catching up. I am still very tied to the WWE family.”
Cena’s transition way from the frontline of the wrestling world has been made easier by his burgeoning acting career, which will hit new heights over the next year with parts in established action franchises The Fast and Furious and The Suicide Squad.
Although he made his big-screen debut in 2006 in the forgettable action movie The Marine, Cena has become better known in the last five years for his comedy chops, with appearances in the children’s hits Daddy’s Home 2 and Playing With Fire as well as scene-stealing parts in more adult fare such as Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck and Blockers.
In what he calls “a happy accident”, he’s also carved out a niche in film versions of beloved children’s books with the title role in the animated Ferdinand in 2017 and voicing polar bear Yoshi in Robert Downey Jr’s star-studded live action Dolittle, which opens this week.
The hulking, musclebound Cena says he gets a kick out of subverting audience expectations by playing against his macho, testosterone-fuelled WWE image.
In Trainwreck, for example, he was a needy, cheated-on boyfriend, while in Blockers he played a sensitive, over-protective suburban dad, who suffered the indignity of a hilarious “butt chug” while trying to find his daughter on prom night.
“I think all that stuff is fun,” he says.
“When you work so hard to establish identity and expectation as in ‘I expect John Cena to come out into the ring in jean shorts and a ball cap to trumpets and people yelling and do the best he can to win the day’.
“That, over the course of 15 years, develops a sense of expectation. And you can continue to deliver on those expectations and that’s an awesome story but you can also be brave enough to challenge those expectations. With that comes tremendous risk, because the failure is huge but if you can succeed and make someone say ‘wow, I didn’t know you could do that’, there’s no better feeling.”
Cena says it was WWE that prepared him to take those risks and gave him the thick skin he needed to flirt with failure in the pursuit of greater challenges.
Some time around the mid-200s, his wrestling career shifted to the point that he became one of the sport’s most hated figures at the same time he was one of the most loved.
“For the next decade of my career or maybe longer, I was called every name in the book, I was the butt of every joke – and this is in the career that I felt most comfortable in,” he reflects.
“I always said, one of these days I will be able to stand in front of a WWE audience and thank them not only for making me the professional who I am today, but the man I am today.
“They don’t understand that ability to be humbled and humiliated in front of mass audience and experience that sort of failure and still do it remaining who you are and not changing to roll with what’s trending or what’s hot right now, it’s made me be authentic and literally made me who I am.”
Today Cena is a model of positivity. His Twitter feed is peppered with inspirational thoughts and it was that can-do attitude that the Dolittle producers tapped into when he was asked to voice Yoshi, the relentlessly upbeat “bro-lar” bear who hates the cold.
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“We went through really ‘bro-ey’ editions of Yoshi, we went through angry editions and the one we settled on, which I was very thankful for, was the word ‘positive’,” says Cena.
“He’s a glass half full, positive-thinking polar bear. That indicates a friendship and connection and a warmth. And that one word, warmth, made me realise that Yoshi isn’t a polar bear that hates the cold – he is a polar bear that longs for warmth.
“That’s something I am familiar and comfortable with and work on every day for myself. So being able to take the work I am currently doing on myself and insert it into a fictional character, that was pretty fun.”
Dolittle opens tomorrow.