John Cena to star in action comedy Freelance, discusses Marvel rejections

John Cena in Blockers
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John Cena has snagged another role that will showcase his action comedy skills, alongside the talented Alison Brie.

Taken director Pierre Morel will be helming Freelance for his next project, an action comedy that is set to star John Cena and GLOW's Alison Brie. The script, penned by Jacob Lentz, centres on an ‘ex-special forces operator played by Cena who, desperate to escape his humdrum suburban life, takes a job providing security for Brie’s journalist hoping to salvage her career by interviewing a dictator. Naturally, a military coup breaks out in the middle of the interview, forcing the pair and the dictator to escape to the jungle where they must survive the military, dangerous animals and each other.’

The premise seems fun enough, and we could see how the chemistry between the duo could work. The project is set to shoot in Colombia next month, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, Cena has been chatting about getting the Peacemaker role in the DCEU, discussing how it took several rejections, from both Marvel and DC, before he finally found a spot in the superhero game. As discussed with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Cena revealed he auditioned for both Shazam! and Cable in Deadpool 2, to no avail: “I can’t tell you how many superhero roles I’ve been rejected for. Shazam! is certainly one. There was a brief try at the Deadpool universe, rejection… Shazam was Dikembe Mutumbo. There was a few in the Marvel universe, rejected. But you know, I kept trying.”

Ultimately, Cena would find his superhero gig with Peacemaker, starring in both The Suicide Squad movie, and getting his own spin-off TV show. However, even that wasn’t set to happen but for a serendipitous twist of fate, as Cena explains.

“The lows make the highs high. And the crazy thing was, I wasn’t first on the list for Peacemaker. James had a long list, and it happened by accident, too. He’s like, hey, I’m in Atlanta, I’d just love to come and talk to you for a second. We sat down in his pre-production office, which was literally like a war headquarters where you could see the whole movie in posterboard taped around his office, and he started talking about Peacemaker, and he’s like, I think you should do it.”

These days Cena is a busy guy, apart from when it comes to getting in between the feud between The Rock and Vin Diesel, something he’s recently vowed to stay out of. Personally, heading up a TV show called Peacemaker, we think he bears the responsibility to sort this one out, but, er, we’ll maybe leave it to somebody else to tell him that…

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