Big Bad John

‘Third floor, can’t miss him,” says the guy at the gym counter. And by floor two, looking up at that final flight of stairs, you understand. Glaring down from the top step is a beast of a man, shirtless, ripped and ready to throw down. He’s got his arm cocked back, his hand held in a fist, his leg slightly raised, and he stays just so, frozen in that I’m-gonna-punch-you pose. Pop goes a camera, and Flex magazine has its cover shot.
“Great,” says a photographer. “Now, for this last one, just do whatever you want. Anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
The cover boy happily obliges, squats in closer to the lens and, um, raises his two middle fingers. Flash, some laughter all around, and that’s a wrap. Meet John Cena, the ripped wrestling star, coming to a theater near you in this weekend’s action film, “The Marine.”
“I’ve always been a ham,” says Cena, later recalling another photo once taken of him. He was about 5, attending his brother’s grade-school play, and before the show began, he ran up onstage to tell the audience he was Superman. And then he dived, and then he dropped.
“Steel chairs below,” he remembers. “My parents still have the picture of me, peeking up, with a smile on my face and two huge black eyes, all because I wanted to be Superman in front of everybody. … I’ve always wanted to entertain.”
Cena, now 29, is a fixture on television on WWE and, at press time, its reigning champ.
He raps, too. His wrestling popularity was built on his ability to freestyle on opponents before matches, psyching them out, a talent he later translated into a hit rap album.
And now Cena acts: In “The Marine,” a rubber-burning, pistol-popping, men-flying-through-windows action flick, he plays an honorably discharged Marine in hot pursuit of his kidnapped wife and the men who took her.
Wrestler-turned-rapper-turned-actor. Uh-huh. Cena has seen the eyes roll — and he makes no apologies. Growing up in the small town of West Newbury, Mass., he loved wrestling — watched it on TV every weekend with his father and four brothers. Beginning at age 13, he loved rap, too, and its “nature of rebellion,” he says, “the do-what-everybody-else-isn’t-doing, do-it-loud-and-be-proud-of-it” message.
But in his small, mostly white town, these likes led to trouble. “I got beat up, picked on, got called every name in the freakin’ book,” Cena remembers. “At the same time, I never once said, ‘OK, I’m going with the herd now.’ ”
Instead, he went to the gym, and by 15, he had pumped enough iron to where nobody messed with John Cena. Nobody made fun of his beloved Fat Boys rap album, his baggy pants, his high-top fade. He watched what he wanted, listened to what he wanted, did what he wanted.
Going from the one-take wrestling routine to the more scripted, multi-take ritual of making a movie was a humbling experience. “I had to tell everybody I was working with, ‘Listen, this is my first time out. … Straight up, if it’s bad, tell me it’s bad,’ ” he says.
With much help and many takes, “I think I got the hang of it,” Cena says. But don’t think he’s ready to leave the mat, à la The Rock. “Whatever opportunity comes around,” he says, “I’m gonna take it by the horns. But I’m not using wrestling as a springboard to get me somewhere else. My home is in that ring.”   

© USA Weekend Magazine, October 15, 2006