In promotion for his upcoming film Dolittle, John Cena sat down with CinemaBlend.com to discuss, among other topics, professional wrestlers making the jump to Hollywood.
The 16-time world champion gives a huge amount of credit to Dwayne Johnson, who of course became the biggest name associated with the wrestling business over the last 25 years, before transitioning into becoming one of the biggest megastars the film industry has ever seen.
“He just made it acceptable to be something other than your wrestling persona. If you look at the correlation of wrestlers or WWE personalities in movies, they essentially played extensions of their WWE personality. I think Dwayne was one of the first ones to break that mold, and do it on such a grand scale that he couldn’t be ignored.”
John Cena and The Rock battled in an iconic match at WrestleMania 28 in which the “Great One” emerged victorious, before Cena got his win back (as well as the WWE Championship) the following year at WrestleMania 29.
Big Match John went on to land small but memorable roles in Trainwreck and Sisters, an HBO project from Andy Samberg called Tour de Pharmacy, as well as Daddy’s Home 2. He got his first major starring role in the comedy Blockers, and in 2018 had his biggest performance yet in the Transformer’s spinoff Bumblebee.