But we are now living in a golden age of actors who were once wrestlers, and in fact, who found acting to be such a better way to pay the bills that they stopped wrestling entirely. (Of course, their age, and a desire for a less strenuous activity for their bodies, were likely also factors in this.)
The one who paved the way for this new generation was Dwayne Johnson, and I'll mention his stage name because we're talking about wrestling here: The Rock. He was the one who made us realize that ringside charisma could really carry over to movie star charisma, and that if he didn't naturally have the performance instincts to become a decent actor, he had the building blocks to learn them. And despite some obvious examples of on-screen struggles, he has become a genuinely capable actor able to play a variety of different modes, even comedy quite effectively, as well as one of the biggest movie stars and highest paid actors.
Then came Dave Bautista, who we would still likely consider the most technically skilled actor to emerge from wrestling. Bautista let us know early on through his role in Guardians of the Galaxy that he was an adept comedian, but he has also become a go-to guy for a big director like Denis Villeneuve, who doesn't have much of an instinct for comedy at all. Everyone who watches Dave Bautista on screen knows he has "it."
The johnny-come-lately, whom I have taken a long time to really accept, has been Jon Cena. I'm not sure what my primary hesitation was regarding Cena, except for the "Okay, prove it" mentality I have toward any wrestler who tries to transfer over to mainstream acting. I think some of the earliest movies he appeared in were not personal favorites of mine, such as Trainwreck, and then I think his face reminded me a bit too much of steroid heads I considered bullies back in high school.
Now, though, I'm wonder if Cena isn't close to becoming the standard bearer for wrestlers-turned-actors.
My Friday night viewing of Argylle is not really the appropriate occasion to write this post, both because his role in it is quite small and because I didn't like the movie at all. However, I'm writing it now because Argylle made me realize how much I'm seeing Cena, how interested casting directors are in casting him. And with good reason. When I saw Cena pop up in Argylle, I got an immediate jolt of optimism -- one that was unwarranted, unfortunately.
Cena did have more than seven minutes of screen time in another movie I saw recently, Ricky Stanicky, the latest from Peter Farrelly, and likely the best we could hope for from a latter-day Farrelly brothers movie. Although I opted for a 3.5-star rating on Letterboxd, I flirted with four stars, as the film reminded me of that mix of heart and gross-out comedy those brothers were capable of producing at their height.
And a lot of that was thanks to Cena, who plays the title character -- a fictitious creation by a trio of friends on whom they blame everything from a Halloween prank gone wrong (in their youth) to the reason they have to miss a baby shower (now, as adults). Cena's character is actually an aspiring actor who does porno music parodies -- in other words, he sings a familiar pop song on stage in costume, but changes its lyrics to be X-rated -- in Atlantic City, but he agrees to play the role of this fictitious friend when their wives begin wondering why they've never met him.
Anyway, this role could have been played very broadly, as a disaster with a heart of gold who only stumbles into not constantly ruining everything. Surely in part thanks to Farrelly, Cena gives this character a lot more than the traits the role calls for, and this comparative restraint was one of the things I liked best about the movie.
So to get back on track, how it is that I now view Cena as possibly the equal or even the better of Johnson and Bautista?
Well for one, those guys seem to be scaling back ever so slightly. If you take away his appearances as Drax the Destroyer -- which should be over now -- Bautista has only been appearing in about one film per year the last couple years. That seems to be by choice, and to be fair, he does currently have ten projects of all shapes and sizes that are scheduled for future release, according to IMDB. Johnson seems to be stepping back even more than Bautista. Since he had two high-profile movies in 2021 -- Jungle Cruise and Red Notice -- Johnson has had only one movie he's starred in, that being 2022's Black Adam. He had an uncredited appearance in the end credits of the last Fast and Furious movie, but that hardly counts.
Cena is only too happy to fill this void. Perhaps with the energy of being five years younger than Johnson and eight years younger than Bautista, Cena had five movie credits in 2023 and already the aforementioned two in 2024. Like the others, his IMDB credits are also littered with various WWE things, but I suspect many of them are running series that are listed near the top of their most recent activities simply because that's how TV shows are handled on IMDB.
But more than the quantitative advantages Cena currently has, he's got some qualitative advantages too. Cena seems a bit more committed to comedy than either of the other two, Johnson because he can't do it as well and Bautista because he seems eager not to be defined by Drax the Destroyer. Cena will gleefully show up and be funny, and in fact, now we kind of expect him to do that. And he doesn't disappoint.
His work seems to have gone from "wait and see approach" to "possible comedy gold" with his involvement in The Suicide Squad and the series that has spun off it, which I still have not seen, but which I feel I can make positive assumptions about, that being Peacemaker. He understands how to be on tone in movies featuring almost a gleeful level of violence, where the comedy has to be just right in order to keep our stomachs from turning.
I've called Jon Cena the johnny-come-lately, but you know what? His first movie was 18 years ago, in 2006, when he was not even 30. It was called The Marine, and I watched it primarily because a guy I know had a significant supporting role in it. I didn't like that movie and I didn't like Cena in it, because 2006 was not a time when big muscle heads realized they needed to be self aware and not take themselves too seriously. But that's only a few years after Johnson started making movies, and a whole eight years before I first identified Bautista in the original Guardians. So by any reasonable assessment of things, these three are all contemporaries, with Bautista the johnny-come-lately of the three if any of them are -- which is also true because he started when he was a lot older than they were.
But I liked Dave Bautista instantly, and Cena had to earn it. Now that he's earned it, though, I am always pleased as punch to see him appear in a new film -- and his face doesn't even remind me of the chemically enhanced bullies who used to punch me on the shoulder in the hallways.
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