How John Cena Really Reacted To WWE Heel Turn Pitch
John Cena had quite the reaction to Triple H’s pitch for the WWE icon to turn heel as he relished taking on perhaps the juiciest role of his career.
John Cena shocked the world at Elimination Chamber when he turned heel, viciously attacking Cody Rhodes while aligning with The Rock.
Cena will challenge Rhodes for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 41 as he seeks to win a record-breaking 17th world title. But it could have been all very different if Triple H had different creative plans for the star.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast, Triple H explained the process of John Cena’s retirement tour and credited Cena with being a true professional and happy to make the best of whatever WWE wanted to do with him:
As we came into it John is going to come back and he wants to retire and do one last run. John and I spoke, and he is very much the quintessential pro in that, ‘I have my thoughts on things, but whatever you want me to do, I will give you 1000% and do that to the best of my ability. I just play a character named John Cena.’ He’s not overly concerned about the stakes of it or anything else.
When we talked he was like, ‘If you want me to lose every match, if you want me to win every match, if you want me to be champion again, that’s all fine with me.’ We started to talk about it and in my mind, and I think it was in his mind too, the safe thing to do is a year-long tour where he goes town to town and he does his greatest hits and it’s safe, easy, and fun.
John Cena Loved Triple H’s Bold Approach
However, Triple H wanted to pull the pin on a huge grenade that would see John Cena turn heel for the first time in 22 years, and Cena was instantly on board:
As a performer, you’re sort of going through the motions and playing the same concert you’ve played a million times. People love it, but I’ve seen it. It’s nice, safe, easy, and fun. I went to John and said, ‘What if we pull the lever that no one wanted to ever pull and what if we turn you heel.’ To me, it felt like, if you never do it, it’s just left dangling there. Now, we get to write for this guy that has been this ultimate good guy for 20-plus years. We get to turn him bad. How does that look?
In the first conversation we had about it on the phone, John is very great with pitches, he lets you get all the way to the end, he doesn’t say much, he just listens and when you get to the end he was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t think that’s where you were going to go with this. That’s bold, but I f*cking love it. I love it because I could be safe, I could be easy, I could come in and phone this in and do my greatest hits and move on or I could be challenged. This is challenging to me. This is a juicy role. Now, how do I make these people hate me?’
Who knows, by December, does he see the light and become a good guy again? Maybe. Does he retire as a bad guy?