The WWE wrestler turned actor has built an enviable Hollywood career playing idiots – capable idiots with real heart, but dimwits nevertheless. Still, Cena is obviously nobody’s fool; fools don’t rise from humble beginnings to become their generation’s answer to Hulk Hogan or The Rock. Would the Cena who appears on my computer screen be the real one?
Or something closer to the comic-book characters he embodies so well: guileless, silly and fond of a deliberate misunderstanding? It is immediately clear that this is no manchild. Perfectly punctual, he greets me with a lavish formality befitting a man who made his film debut as the title character in The Marine.
Within a minute he has volunteered, unprompted, that “a core value of mine is respect”. Cena, 49, is speaking to me on behalf of Matchbox: The Movie, a film extension of the Mattel toy car brand for Apple TV, and for 45 minutes he is generous, funny, complimentary and elusive without ever being evasive. It’s a genuinely radical thing for a man built like a chest freezer – having only recently retired from wrestling after 26 years – to be so relaxed about being ridiculous, and in an age of such joyless online strongmen as Trump, Musk and Andrew Tate, his buff charm is welcome.
John Cena is a company man. The word “loyalty” comes up often, and about everything from his friends back home to the wrestling to the US itself. But Cena’s loyalty has drawn him into some uncomfortable positions, and for 20 minutes our good-natured chat about reliability, discipline and what it means to owe everything to something bigger than yourself has set us on a collision course with one of the most disgraced figures in modern entertainment.
In January 2024, Vince McMahon, the all-powerful chairman and CEO of WWE, resigned from the organisation and its parent company TKO Group Holdings following a slew of sexual assault allegations and pending lawsuits that made his position in the company he’d spent his life building untenable. The final straw was a suit filed by a former WWE employee, Janel Grant, alleging that McMahon sexually assaulted her and pressed her into sexual acts during her time at the company, sent explicit images of her with other men without her consent, and passed her to others – in one instance, the filing says, to help secure a wrestler the company hoped to sign. McMahon denies all the allegations and in June, the litigation between him, the WWE and Grant was transferred voluntarily by all parties from the federal court into confidential private arbitration.
McMahon was a mentor to Cena, and as well as sponsoring his career, provided him a second family amid the travelling circus of 00s wrestling. What is strange isn’t that he foresaw this line of questioning – it’s that Cena took such an unequivocal stance in the face of something so potentially damaging. He is audibly proud of the association, revelling in the idea that he’s abiding by his principles in the face of what he calls “the storm”.
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