You can’t help but marvel at the sheer coincidences that the movie business throws up on a regular basis, with Margot Robbie the latest big name to reveal a wild fact that she’d probably largely erased from her memory before pitching up to the set of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad for the first time to share scenes opposite John Cena.
Cena reigned as the biggest star in the professional wrestling industry for close to fifteen years, shifting a ton of merchandise in the process thanks to his penchant for a garish color scheme and family-friendly good guy persona. That’s not to say that he didn’t appeal to adults as well, especially after Robbie dropped the bombshell in a new interview that she spent years sleeping in a room where a life-size cardboard cutout of John Cena took pride of place.
“I was with a man who was obsessed with John Cena. So much so that he dressed as John Cena for his 21st birthday. He had a cardboard cutout of John Cena in his bedroom. So, I slept in a room for two years with a life-size cardboard cutout of John Cena, in the room! Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and gasp, ‘Oh it’s just John Cena, it’s okay’.
I remember thinking like, now that I’m going to be working with John Cena, should I tell him this or is that going to be weird?I thought I’m just going to keep that to myself, that would be a weird way to start out a working relationship and friendship. Then, five seconds later I was like, ‘I used to sleep in a room with a life-size cutout of you’. But, now I know there’s very little to weird out this guy.”
At the time she was spending her nights with the cardboard Cena as her watchful protector, Robbie would have been in the midst of her 353-episode stint on Australian soap opera Neighbors, and there’s little chance she could have envisioned that a decade later she’d be a two-time Academy Award nominated star and producer, playing the role of Harley Quinn for a third time in a blockbuster that just so happened to co-star the man himself.
Even more ironically, Cena only boarded The Suicide Squad after Dave Bautista turned down the part written specifically for him by James Gunn in order to headline Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, opening the door for another ex-WWE star to step in, and now Peacemaker is even getting his own HBO Max spinoff out of the deal. That being said, it would have been a picture to see Cena’s face when Robbie first told him about their one-sided history.
