Former WWE Champion John Cena admits that his early movies “sucked”
During an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s Needs A Friend podcast, former WWE Champion John Cena discussed his transition from professional wrestling to acting and the challenges he faced while establishing himself in Hollywood. Here is what Cena had to say…
“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.
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 apesh*t 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, and you’re like, I wanted to be there. My focus was elsewhere.
And again, I think I’ve had at least a bit of control over knowing when something is happening. Like, ‘Do you want to rap?’ I do. It’s going to be ridiculous. I’ll do it. Like, I’ll be ridiculous instead of putting roadblocks.
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.’ I was hosting the Today Show. I was reading the news, doing live programming. I was having fun.
So, if you’re going to get back into this, I just told myself, put the same amount of passion you do in wrestling into this.
And at the very least, you won’t regret your choices. And 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 f*ck 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.”