John Cena was recently interviewed by ESPN. This was in order to promote his new movie, Bumblebee.
During the interview, Cena discussed why he doesn’t wrestle for WWE when he is filming a movie.
Here is what he said (h/t to Wrestling INC for the quotes below):
“Anything that you rely on your body for an end result, time is gonna catch up with you. So there is gonna come a point where I can no longer keep up with the pace. I made a promise to myself years ago, years before I ever found my passion for being on screen, when I can’t keep up with the pace, I gotta walk away. I don’t wanna take a ticket buyers money and have them sit down and be like, ‘Eh, he’s just hanging on’. I don’t ever want that feeling. So, I don’t think that correlates with what I’m doing now. The biggest difficulty is trying to juggle stuff because I have learned, and I’m trying to fight this system but I’m losing, once you’re in production for a movie, they don’t allow you to wrestle. Because I can’t go to a WWE taping and have my nose put over here.
“Not only doesn’t it look good, it’s, ‘Man, you don’t look right.’ So they shut the whole movie down, (there are) 150 people that are expecting a paycheck for that movie and I just screwed them out of their wage. It ups the budget of the movie, so I just put the movie behind the eight ball of possibly being a financial success.”
“As much as I want to do everything, you can’t. And this is a giant misunderstanding that I had about what Dwayne was doing, about what The Rock was doing. Because he does movie after movie, after movie, after movie, and I know the feeling of wanting to go back. And I’m going back as soon as I can, but I can’t go back until I’m done with this. So, I totally get it. And I kinda called him out for it and that was me being an ass, and I was totally wrong, and ignorant, and young, and stupid, and I’ve told him I’m sorry but I think that’s something our fans don’t understand.”
On a related note, here are some hilarious John Cena drinking stories.
