STACK #232 February 2024

FEATURE MOVIE

FLEXING HIS MUSCLE

Following college, John Cena moved to California in 1999 to pursue a bodybuilding career. However, he found himself earning only $6 per hour at a gym, and was forced to live in his car. Cut to 2024 and his net worth is in the ballpark of $80M, and he has a collection of over 20 rare and vintage American muscle cars.

with other veterans and other people I knew who had been doing unique, high-stress work, and then suddenly had to transition to a normal day-to-day routine and pretend like it’s all great. It’s going from one hundred miles per hour to five. I guess that either makes sense to people or it doesn’t, but that was what I was interested in. And obviously it isn’t one profession – a journalist, for instance, could have the same sort of experience. That is where Claire came from,” he explains.

(in the Jungle)

Hollywood muscleman John Cena takes to the jungle to protect Alison Brie in Freelance , from the director of Taken . Words Gill Pringle J ohn Cena’s former US Special Forces soldier Mason Pettits is miserable, after being injured and medically discharged

The filmmakers immediately saw how Lentz’s script leant itself to a kind of Romancing the Stone scenario. “The challenge actually is to balance the sexual tension between characters, because there is this attraction, the intense action, and the comic relief, which is the goal of making an action

sparks fly between him and the reporter he was hired to safeguard. Screenwriter Jacob Lentz tells STACK how the inspiration for Freelance came from the experience of his own ex-Army buddy. “I was interested in people who dedicate themselves to a

following a failed mission to assassinate Paldonian dictator Juan Venegas. Now working at a mediocre law firm, Mason loathes his job, although he finds happiness at home with his wife and daughter. All that changes when a former Army colleague hires him to protect Alison Brie’s disgraced journalist Claire Wellington, as she goes to Paldonia to interview Venegas. Soon after arriving in Paldonia and meeting the dictator, the pair are ambushed by a group intent on killing Venegas. Mason fights off the assailants and finds safety in the jungle, where

• Freelance is out on Feb 7

comedy,” says director Pierre Morel. “All three of these elements need to be perfectly balanced and trim, and between John Cena and Alison Brie, we found that chemistry was working perfectly. It keeps the audience – and the actors, actually – in that rollercoaster of emotions, which I think is the most fun in these movies.” The filmmakers were delighted to land Cena at this point in his career. “When we started the movie we saw the potential John had, but that was before the success of Peacemaker ,” says Morel. “John has the capacity to do super comedic stuff, and he can obviously do action – his physique is saying a lot. But what is interesting with this is that he plays a slightly fragilised character, who is an everyday man, who is thrown back into a world he was willing to forget. “And what I think is great about Alison is that she is so versatile,” Morel enthuses of Brie. “She can do anything. She is a Swiss Army Knife for directors, basically. She can give you crazy comedy. She can be extremely dramatic. I think she was fantastic. She doesn’t want to be stuck in one niche.”

specific identity, and then suddenly have it yanked away,” he says. “A good friend was Army Special Forces,

but ended up hurt and got med-boarded out. Suddenly he was living as a civilian, and just trying to have civilian type conversations about real estate and

professional sports teams and the rest of it, and he was

struggling. There was an aspect of a caged tiger with him. “I saw similar things

John Cena holds the Guinness World Record title of granting the most Make-A-Wish wishes to critically ill children. Since 2002, he has granted over 650 of them. What a guy! DYK?

(L to R) John Cena, Alison Brie, and Luan Pablo Raba.

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