John Cena tapped into his WWE background for new action comedy Jackpot!, coaching co-star Awkwafina on how to throw a punch during a scene where she was supposed to break his nose.
“I’ve had my nose broken in real life and this was a prosthetic so that was fantastic. I really think the setup for it was fun and when she actually did it and we did the gag, it looked great and it plays well in the movie,” Cena told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s premiere on Tuesday, adding that he told Awkwafina to “Swing for the fences, and she did.”
In the film, directed by Paul Feig, a Grand Lottery has been newly established in California, where lottery losers are allowed to kill the winner before sundown to legally claim their multi-billion dollar jackpot. Awkwafina is that lottery winner on the run, with Cena as her accomplice.
Of finding the chemistry in their unlikely pairing, Cena noted, “She was playing an anxious character who didn’t know what the hell was going on, and I get to be a peaceful, soothing voice of reason. And I think those are both really strong assets of our wheelhouse so we kind of just got to be ourselves and have jokes and funniness around that.”
Feig explained that he took a chance that the two would work well together, particularly after being a longtime fan of Cena. “The first time I talked to him, the first thing he said was, ‘Don’t think you have to make me look cool.’ And I was like well that I kind of love, because that’s all I want out of my comedy stars, and you never know with a big action star, if they’re going to be like, ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that, I won’t look silly.’ And he just does it all.”
That doing it all includes a recent cameo in season three of The Bear, with Cena appearing as Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) cousin Sammy Fak. He told THR that creator Christopher Storer reached out to his team asking him to come join the cast, and “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It was a dream.”
He continued, “I have the upmost respect for that cast and crew. I admire their work, they’ve entertained me — I got to tell them all how much they’ve entertained me and how much their work means to me. I think that’s important because a lot of times people say, ‘I love your stuff’ but they don’t say like, ‘Hey your work affected my life.’ My wife and I really enjoy that show a lot. Man, it was awesome, it was a great experience.”
Jackpot!, which also star Simu Liu, has drawn comparisons to a comedic version of The Purge or John Wick, but Feig points out those movies “don’t have a great view of mankind. I wanted it to be good natured, so even though this has a really dark core, it’s the fact that you buy into the lottery — if you’re in the lottery you’ve decided that you approve of it. But you find out as the movie goes along that most people don’t actually approve of the lottery and are actually more fans of Awkwafina’s who are rooting for her to get to the end.” The filmmaker pointed to inspiration from wanting “this to be a Jackie Chan movie — he’s my favorite comedic filmmaker of the modern time but I also love the Pink Panther movies and all those things too, which are all very physical.”
Jackpot! hits theaters on Thursday.
