John Cena On TV-PG: “The Blood Is One Thing I Miss”

Rolling Stone recently did an in depth interview with John Cena where he talked about his true feelings towards his character, the limitations WWE’s TV-PG rating, why he doesn’t want to get married and more. You can check out the interview here along with some highlights below.

During the interview John Cena said that he knows his character is “Dudley Do-Right personified. A goody-two-shoes dude who looks like f**king John Q. Average.” He also made it seem like a heel turn is unlikely to happen in the near future.

“Your job as a superstar is to manipulate the audience and try to tell your story,” Cena said. “I like the dynamic of the audience. Every single night it’s different. But what’s weird is that I’m a good guy because of all the kids and parents who like me, and a bad guy because I won’t turn heel, which actually makes me both good guy and bad guy in one person.”

Cena also talked about WWE’s current direction with TV-PG programming and admitted that the rating comes with some limitations.

“I’m a 38-year-old man. I’d much rather it be a program geared toward me, whether that’s TV-14 or sometimes even more graphic than that, which is what I like. For one thing, profanity brought fire out of people with personalities that backed the language. It’s very difficult to say, ‘Oh, you’re being poopy,’ especially when they’re meant to be fighting words. And now, if someone starts to bleed, the referee intervenes to stop the bleeding. But before, you’d just let it fly. Blood is one of the things that made fights cool. Like, you knew it had gotten serious. I understand why we don’t do it anymore. Vince has been a coach to me, a father figure, a boss and a friend, and his goal and my goal are the same: to make the company be as big as it can be. But, yeah, the blood is one thing I miss.”