- John Cena “turned heel” at Saturday’s WWE Elimination Chamber, ending a 22-year run as WWE’s top good guy
- Cena appears to be teaming up with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and will compete in a world title match against Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania on April 20
- If Cena wins, he will become the all-time leader in career world championships, besting Ric Flair’s 16 wins
It’s been nearly a week since the unthinkable happened when John Cena turned “heel” and became WWE’s ultimate bad guy.
But Cena, 47, has still yet to directly address his WWE character’s shocking actions at the Elimination Chamber event on Saturday, March 1, as fans await an explanation for one of the most long-awaited storylines in professional wrestling history.
Cena took the WWE audience by surprise last Saturday when he “turned heel” and became an on-screen bad guy for the first time since 2003, ending his decades-long run as WWE’s most righteous hero and joining forces with his longtime rival Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to beat up the Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes.
The storyline is expected to culminate at WrestleMania 41 in Las Vegas come April 20, where the WWE announced Cena and Rhodes, 39, will face each other for the WWE Championship. If Cena wins, he will become the all-time leader in career world championships, eclipsing Ric Flair’s record of 16 world championships throughout his wrestling career.
But Cena – the “John Cena” the beloved actor plays on WWE television – has since remained silent about what drove him to have a change of heart and turn his back on the WWE fans.
To explain: WWE, the long-running, episodic pro wrestling program, features a storyline that operates much like a soap opera, with its characters often going through moral changes throughout their careers, swinging between chapters of their storylines as “babyfaces” (or, “good guys”) and “heels” (“bad guys”). Cena has been a unique case in WWE history, however, having not played a “heel” on screen since 2003, shortly after he first debuted as a wrestler.
According to Guinness World Records, Cena’s 22-year run as WWE’s top “babyface” is the longest that any pro wrestler has ever gone without becoming a bad guy in the company’s storied history.
WWE called Cena’s heel turn “one of the most shocking moments in WWE history” this week and declared that “John Cena as we know him is no more.” The moment made headlines around the world, and even had ESPN talking heads asking, “John Cena, why? Why?!” after he took directive from The Rock and began attacking Rhodes at the end of last weekend’s event.
Cena has yet to appear on television to explain exactly why he decided to join forces with The Rock, a longtime rival he’s shared both fictional and real-life beef with over the years. A WWE spokesperson did not immediately respond to PEOPLE when asked about when audiences can expect Cena to appear on television next to address his actions.
Cena, himself a 16-time world champion, briefly appeared at a post-show press conference after WWE’s Elimination Chamber event and walked into the room, picked up the microphone, and dropped it before taking any questions.
Since then, Cena has only cryptically tweeted in reference to last Saturday. “Have the discipline to do what needs to be done, especially when you don’t feel like it,” he wrote on X on Monday. And on Wednesday, Cena posted: “How others respond to us tends to say a whole lot more about them than it does about us. Evaluate it and don’t take it personal.”
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In recent weeks, Cena has opened up about wanting to become a heel before he retires from pro wrestling later this calendar year, revealing to pro wrestling interviewer Chris Van Vliet that he was once “ready” to turn heel in 2012 and even had new ring gear and new theme music made.
In the complicated world of pro wrestling, where fans enjoy the show by knowingly buying into the scripted storyline, Cena’s character turn is one that crowds have long clamored for for years in hopes of watching a juicy storyline play out.
“The weird thing is, that’s supposed to happen,” Cena told Van Vliet recently while discussing his desire to play a bad guy on WWE television. “If you think of the course of human life, no one is perfect, right? It’s very tough each day to wake up and live a good life. It’s tough to be mistake free.”
“So, that’s human trajectory,” he continued. “We all go through patches where we make decisions against our value system. We all turn heel at one point. It’s just a matter of if you see the light. And I think that’s what makes a lot of the characters redeemable, is you take a really good good-guy and have them lose their way. It’s Darth Vader in Star Wars. You want to root for him, because you don’t give up on that guy. You know there’s good in him. That’s beautiful. Those stories are beautiful.”
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