James Gunn spills how ‘Peacemaker’ guest star felt about risque joke

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Peacemaker finale.

Today’s Peacemaker finale was just as shocking as you would expect for a show that’s managed to surprise audiences at every turn — for starters, just by being as good as it is. In the conclusion to the HBO Max hit’s first season, John Cena’s eponymous anti-hero and his band of allies proved to be the Earth’s last line of defense as they came up against the alien butterflies set on subjugating the planet.

Big spoilers from the next paragraph on!

Except they might’ve had some help if the world’s finest had been just a little quicker to the scene. In the episode’s standout sequence, the Justice League arrives after the day’s been saved, with Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller reprising their roles as Aquaman and the Flash, respectively.

Fans have had their minds blown by this sequence as we didn’t expect two of the DCEU’s leading movie stars to show up, especially as Peacemaker has been doing its best to smear the Justice League’s reputation all season. Cena’s Chris Smith has constantly been making up unseemly rumors about the heroes, including that the King of Atlantis secretly likes to, uh, sleep with the fishes. So how did Momoa feel about this attack on Arthur Curry’s character? It turns out he thought the joke was hilarious too.

While explaining how Momoa’s cameo came together, creator James Gunn recalled to Variety that his own friendship with the actor, plus Aquaman producer Peter Safran working on Peacemaker, made it easy to pull off. However, before shooting started, Gunn thought it only right to warn Momoa of how Aquaman was going to be treated on the show. And he had a surprising reaction.

“I think before we ever shot the show, we talked to Jason about it. We were like, “Listen, [Peacemaker] says you f–k fish all the time.” And we were a little afraid he would be upset, but he just laughed. He was cool. So he was pretty much on board from the beginning.”

Seeing how much work Momoa has put it to rehabilitating Aquaman’s reputation after decades of him being a joke, it would’ve been fair enough if he was a little affronted by all the gags at his expense in Peacemaker, but clearly, he was game for it, which makes his foul-mouthed cameo in the finale all the sweeter.

The complete first season of Peacemaker is streaming on HBO Max now.