John Cena recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet at WrestleMania weekend, and was asked about his busy schedule now as an actor compared to when he was wrestling full-time. Cena says he can’t do certain things any more like fly to multiple events in a day like he used to, but can now find himself appreciating the wrestling aspect more from the other side of the lens now:
“The busy is different. Acting is a patient person’s game. It’s being in a location for a certain amount of time, every day chipping away at making this body of work become real. Sports entertainment is ‘we’re here tonight, we’re doing this thing tonight, we’re going to the next one, we’re going here tomorrow, like we’ll be at MetLife [Stadium] on Sunday and Brooklyn on Monday. The offseason is twelve hours long. It’s a different type of busy. I am much more tied up now. I look back to a few years ago when I was able to host the Today show in the morning, and fly to RAW that night. I really enjoyed doing that because I thought that was really special. I come from a Universe where we can accomplish everything. WWE Superstars literally do not set limits on how they can push their brains and their bodies. I remember one trip with having matches with Bray Wyatt where we were in Tokyo one night, New York the next night, Los Angeles—it was an awesome trip around the world in an unimaginable amount of time, but I wanted to do it to say ‘wow, this was a cool thing to do.’ Now, it’s like when a movie has you for the movie, they have you. You can’t do anything else and you’re certainly not allowed to do anything physical—which is extremely tough for me to explain because once again, in the ‘Wayback Machine’ I have a certain view of what I’ve become—and I’ve now become what I despised. But, looking from the other side of it, I was thinking like everyone who is going to be in the seats at WrestleMania. This is what I live for, this is who I am, it’s what I’ve invested my life in. Why would I want to do anything else?
I’m going to be 42, I still have my health; I’m not going to be one of those people that says ‘I’m 42 and losing my health.’ I feel great, but I also see that the business is evolving. The in-ring product is evolving and it is quick, it is fast, and it is crisp. None of those three words have ever been used to describe me. [laughs] So, it is really about truly knowing who you are and who you aren’t, and that’s why I’m comfortable—I was in Vancouver shooting a movie and WWE had a SmackDown Live event in Vancouver—I wore [the outfit he’s wearing in the video] and sat at the producer’s table the entire time and loved it. I got to see the show as a fan. That’s what I love so much about last year’s WrestleMania, dude. I think every talent, if you’re out there and you have a chance to sit in the audience for a show, do it. It’s the best. I know we all watch from a monitor backstage and we peek around and look at the show from the curtain, but when you can be in the element and see it from that side, it’s magic.”
Read More: John Cena Discusses The Doctor of Thuganomics’s Return
