John Cena has been pretty much everywhere for years now, but he doesn’t make that happen by just sitting around and waiting for people to realize their movie needs a big guy who can flip between “funny” and “punching” the way Dwayne Johnson probably does. No, he makes it happen by making it happen. Apparently.
That’s based on a couple of appearances Cena made on NBC’s Today this week, during which he plugged his appearances in both Fast X and Barbie—two movies that he says “share a lot of parallels.” For example, Cena says “the Barbie cast list is amazing” and “the Fast X cast list is amazing,” and… there are probably other examples beyond that, but he didn’t go into them. Either way, Cena told Today that Fast X was filming across the street from Barbie, and he really wanted to be in Barbie, and it was due to a “happy accident” that it actually happened.
Well, he says “happy accident,” but it sounds more orchestrated than that. Cena says he wanted to do Barbie and was hanging around where the two movies were filming, and he just happened to run into Barbie star Margot Robbie one day and basically pitched himself to her, telling Today that he said he would “do, pretty much, whatever you guys need.”
Again, he says this was all a happy accident, but Vin Diesel’s not in Barbie as far as we know, same with Jason Momoa and Ludacris and all of the other people in Fast X. If this were just a random series of events that resulted in John Cena playing a merman in Barbie, then it would’ve happened for more Fast X people than just the one guy who really wanted to be in Barbie. Also, Cena and Robbie where in The Suicide Squad together, so he had a better shot at being in Barbie than most people already, he just had to get someone to pull the trigger.
Anyway, Cena says Robbie luckily made “a lot of the decisions” when it came to casting Barbie, so—whether or not director Greta Gerwig was on board, we don’t know—she made it happen. And now John Cena gets to do the two John Cena things (again, “funny” and “punching”) in two movies! We assume there’s punching in Barbie. What else would a merman do? It’s not like he can kick.