John Cena is understood for his work ethic as an actor, which was evident when Polygon met him in London for a quick interview for Matthew Vaughn’s new movie Argylle. Cena, his wrestler’s physique filling out a sensible three-piece go well with, sat upright, made locked-in eye contact, turned on his appreciable charisma, and gave full, considerate solutions — hustling arduous to advertise a film he has solely a small half in.
A part of that work ethic is having the humility to scrap his preconceptions a couple of function and let his director prepared the ground. Cena performs Wyatt, a sidekick to Henry Cavill’s superspy Aubrey Argylle; they’re each fiction-within-a-fiction characters who solely seem in sure “fantasy” sequences within the film. Cena said he took an analogous strategy to working with Vaughn on the film as he took with DC Studios head James Gunn on The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, after Gunn successfully scrapped all his cautious prep work for the Peacemaker character with a single little bit of route: “Throw all that away and just be a douchey Captain America.”
Requested which badass motion heroes from the cinematic canon encourage him when he approaches a mission like Argylle, Cena said: “I could give you a list, but I don’t think it applies to Argylle. Argylle is a weird and interesting world. And again, I did the same thing when I approached the DC Universe. I don’t want to fill my head with any biases, because I’m relying on the mind of James Gunn, and in this case, the mind of Matthew Vaughn. And if I come in with, like, ‘These are the badasses I want to emulate, this is what I want to do,’ and he says, ‘Uhhhh…’”
“This happened to me with James,” Cena said. “OK, no problem. I got it! Learning from that experience, I allowed Matthew to curate what he wants. I was open to listening to his opinion, and then playing within his goalposts.”
Cena said the dimensions of his function in Argylle was immaterial to him. He actually needed to work with Vaughn, and he felt it might be disingenuous to place ego-based limits on what that work might be.
“[It was] a chance to be on the track, as I like to say. Just get me on the track,” he said. “Doesn’t matter that it’s an enormous half. That is simply my perspective, however I hate individuals’s notion of, ‘That is beneath me.’ Who the hell am I to say I’m above something or anybody?
“I just like a chance to be able to tell stories. If I really love it, I don’t want to tell a story on my terms; I just want to get out on the track. So this was a chance to work with someone I said I wanted to work with. And I’d be one hell of a hypocrite if I was like, ‘I’d love to work with you, but just on my terms.’ You know, opportunity shows up? Take it.”
Cena is likely to be hoping for a much bigger function in future if Argylle turns right into a franchise, which Vaughn has complicated plans for. Even so, as his performing star rises, his ego-free strategy to his work stands out.
Argylle is in theaters now.
