AEW Star Reveals John Cena Was A Huge Fan Of Controversial Gimmick

According to an AEW wrestler, John Cena likes the weird stuff in wrestling as much as anyone.

Cena has long been described as someone that really loves pro-wrestling. It wasn’t a job to him but something he truly enjoyed. But even though he exuded so much passion for it, he wasn’t immune to controversy, either.

In fact, at one point Cena was considered arguably the most polarizing figure in WWE. his gimmick/personality of always being cheerful, of never showing weakness, and of behaving like a modern-day Superman generated plenty of controversy, especially among more committed and vocal wrestling fans.

But according to AEW’s Matt Hardy, John Cena loves the controversial wrestling stuff as much as he likes the ‘standard’ stuff.

Speaking on his Extreme life of Matt Hardy podcast, Matt explained that John Cena was a big fan of his “Broken” gimmick that took the wrestling world by storm in 2016 and 2017.

“Whenever I sent a preview of the Final Deletion to [Chris] Jericho … he showed it to John Cena. John Cena said, “‘Oh my God. This is the greatest s*** I’ve ever see in my life.’ … They showed it all throughout the day to the WWE guys [while on tour in Japan] and John Cena watched every single viewing of it.

That’s one of the first things, he was so happy whenever I showed back up [in 2017]. He’s like, ‘Oh my God, I hope you get to do ‘Broken’ Matt here.'”

Matt Hardy did get to portray a similar gimmick in WWE, but it was called “Woken” Matt and it was a heavily watered-down version of the original.

And while he did achieve some mild success under this gimmick – he won the RAW Tag Team Championships alongside Bray Wyatt – he never captured the same magic or creative unpredictability as the original.

h/t WrestlingInc for the transcription