Frank Grillo had no idea who John Cena was before he was cast in “Peacemaker” Season 2, much to his son’s dismay.
The “Warrior” actor has a key role in the second season of James Gunn’s “Peacemaker” as Rick Flag Sr., the father of Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman), whom Cena’s Chris Smith/Peacemaker killed in 2021’s “The Suicide Squad.” In an interview with GQ published Friday, Grillo said he knew nothing about “Peacemaker” or its star when Gunn first approached him about joining the HBO Max series.
“I had never seen ‘Peacemaker.’ I didn’t know who the f—k John Cena was,” Grillo revealed. In order to learn more, he turned to someone who did. “I asked my son, ‘Is John Cena a big wrestler?’” Grillo recalled. “He goes, ‘You’re stupid.’”
Cena’s Hollywood star profile has been on the rise for several years now, and it has been boosted considerably by his collaborations with Gunn and his “Peacemaker” role. He was already a household name before he transitioned to acting, though, having emerged in the early and mid-2000s as one of professional wrestling’s biggest performers.
Over the course of his career, Cena became one of WWE’s most popular and dominant babyfaces. He broke a record earlier this year at WrestleMania when he won one of the promotion company’s world titles for the 17th time, more than any other star in WWE history.
In other words, calling Cena a “big wrestler” would be a massive understatement.
Grillo, for his part, is becoming an increasingly prominent face in Gunn’s new DC Universe. He made his debut as Rick Flag Sr. late last year in the Gunn-created animated DC series “Creature Commandos” and then played the character again in a small role in this summer’s “Superman.” Now, Grillo is playing Flag for the third time in less than a year in “Peacemaker” Season 2.
“I know he’s a man of his word, but I didn’t know how quickly it would all come together,” Grillo told GQ, when asked if he thought that Gunn’s plans for his DC character would come to fruition or not. “I did ‘Creature Commandos’ with him, and he said, ‘I want you to do “Peacemaker,”‘ and I was shooting ‘Tulsa King’ and I said, ‘They’re both in Atlanta, so if they can work the dates out, I’m down.’”
The premiere of “Peacemaker” Season 2 this week serves as part of Gunn’s ongoing launch of the DC Universe. The series’ first season was originally set in the since-abandoned DC Extended Universe. Its new episodes, however, go out of their way to retcon that detail and retroactively place “Peacemaker” in the same DC Universe as “Creature Commandos” and “Superman.”
For Grillo, “Peacemaker” Season 2 gave him the chance to not only reprise his DCU role but also go head-to-head against Cena onscreen. Having now familiarized himself with the WWE star, Grillo called Cena “a scary man.”
“He’s one of those bulls that you see out in the meadow where it’s just muscle, on top of muscle, on top of muscle. When he’s standing still, I look at him sometimes and I’m like, ‘Wow, that guy’s a f—king specimen,’” Grillo said of his “Peacemaker” co-star. “If aliens came down and Cena was the guy they saw, they’d go back to space and say, ‘Forget it, we’re gonna lose.’”
