{"id":67860,"date":"2025-10-09T13:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T13:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/67860\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T13:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T13:27:07","slug":"john-cena-shows-peacemakers-pain-in-career-best-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/67860\/","title":{"rendered":"John Cena shows Peacemaker’s pain in career-best performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Cena<\/a> has spent most of Peacemaker\u2018s second season moping onscreen. His character, Chris Smith, a.k.a. Peacemaker, struggles with grief, loneliness, PTSD, heartbreak, and the constant threat of A.R.G.U.S.\u2019s vengeance-seeking new leader, Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo). Throughout all of this, Cena keeps his titular antihero\u2019s emotions and expressions restrained to convey Chris\u2019 agony as he seeks some semblance of joy. If only Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) would open up about her feelings for him, or he could join the Justice Gang<\/a> and find his purpose. All hell finally breaks loose in the the season\u2019s penultimate half-hour<\/a>, when Chris, to stop his friends from beating up a loved one, unleashes his long pent-up sentiments in one vicious, cathartic shriek and moment of self-reflection that\u2014fair warning\u2014will lead to surprising tears, thanks to Cena\u2019s commitment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This vulnerable version of Chris is miles away from the brutish antagonist introduced in James Gunn\u2019s 2021 film, The Suicide Squad<\/a>. Even among a group of frenzied villains, Peacemaker\u2019s affinity for violence, crude humor, and betraying his teammates made him quite the foe. Cena, with his prolific wrestling career, turned out to be the right fit for a character defined by his machismo in the movie. While he wasn\u2019t given meaty material compared to co-stars like Idris Elba, David Dastmalchian<\/a>, and Daniela Melchior, he brought an earnestness to make the guy who stabbed Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman) just likable enough. And thankfully, writer-director James Gunn planted the seeds of Peacemaker\u2019s rich backstory, as he told Variety in an interview<\/a> that year. DC\u2019s now-co-CEO continues to flesh this out in HBO Max\u2019s spirited spin-off series.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first season, which was released in 2022, unraveled Chris\u2019 turbulent upbringing under his toxic, white-supremacist dad, Auggie (Robert Patrick), and the lingering trauma of accidentally killing his younger brother as a child after being egged on by their pops. The show succeeded at blending this dark superhero fare with plenty of unabashed, loud comedy\u2014a comfort zone for Cena in past efforts like Trainwreck, Playing With Fire, and the slept-on Blockers. In the gap between Peacemaker seasons, Cena sharpened those skills through a delightfully unhinged performance in 2024\u2019s Ricky Stanicky<\/a>, and he even popped up in an episode of The Bear<\/a> as a fast-talking Fak. But in its ongoing sophomore run,which wraps up October 9, Peacemaker is less about the punchlines\u2014although those very much exist\u2014and more about Chris\u2019 tendency to self-sabotage as a way to pay for past sins. The tonal shift allows Gunn to dig deeper into Chris\u2019 misery, and Cena sinks his teeth in to show off his dramatic chops in a way he hasn\u2019t gotten to do before. Clearly, this partnership with Gunn has worked out in his favor. (The director achieved a similar result with another wrestler-turned-actor, Dave Bautista, in Marvel\u2019s Guardians Of The Galaxy movies.) In Peacemaker season two, Chris seeks an escape from his nightmarish reality, where redemption seems impossible for him. So he decides to live in an alternate universe where Keith Smith (David Denman) and Auggie are alive at the cost of ignoring a brutal truth: The Nazis rule this realm. Chris conveniently misses a giant Hitler mural and the swastika on the American flag because he\u2019s overjoyed at spending time with his family and connecting with this dimension\u2019s Emilia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only when the 11th Street Kids\u2014the OG Harcourt, Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), Vigilante (Freddie Stroma), and John Economos (Steve Agee)\u2014come to rescue him that he realizes the truth. In episode seven, \u201cLike A Keith In The Night,\u201d the group attempts to go back to their world when the Smiths confront Chris for killing his doppelganger. And when a revenge-fueled Keith attacks, the crew (including Eagly, of course) wastes no time thrashing him in a gutting confrontation that forces Chris to revisit the memory of his brother dying in his arms. Cue a guttural scream from Chris (\u201cGet off him. What the fuck is wrong with all of us?\u201d), followed by the tearful realization that he is the bad news in every world. As Peacemaker reaches his breaking point, Cena arrives at a new high, with a career-best performance that lets him check off that \u201cmake audiences cry\u201d entry on his bucket list.\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Cena flexes his dramatic muscles in Peacemaker’s confident season 2 premiere<\/a>Jon Stewart lets John Cena’s heel turn explain Trump-Zelenskyy feud<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Cena has spent most of Peacemaker\u2018s second season moping onscreen. His character, Chris Smith, a.k.a. Peacemaker, struggles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-67860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}