Having already cemented himself as one of the most popular WWE superstars of all time, John Cena has steadily given moviegoers reason to believe he’s also a legitimate comedy heavyweight. He obviously pops when embracing cameos like his “accidentally” cast Kenmaid in Barbie, and is a winning lead in James Gunn’s Peacemaker series, but his talent shines the most when he’s playing a somewhat regular dud, as it went in Peter Farrelly’s romp Ricky Stanicky. Though he admits he’s never used an imaginary friend to excuse his behavior, Cena did remind everyone that he more or less gave himself the power of invisibility early in his WWE career.
Years before he played the Atlantic City erotic parody performer who found a new lease on life via the faux Ricky Stinicky persona, John Cena was helping sell out arenas with the WWE. Early on in his run, he brought the catchphrase “You Can’t See Me” into the zeitgeist, which enjoyed a high level of popularity amongst wrestling fans before becoming hitting hall-of-fame tiers of meme culture post-2015. The Trainwreck vet referenced the many memes taking his catchphrase literally when speaking with USA Today, when asked if he’d ever blamed anything on an imaginary friend. In his words:
I've never gone that far. I started telling everyone many years ago that I was invisible, and now they actually believe me.
Now, anyone who watched the 2024 Oscars and saw naked John Cena presenting an award can attest to him not being invisible in the slightest, but I digress. (And he wasn’t really naked, but that’s not the point here.)
Cena then called out just such a joke that fans might make about the interview he was currently having, albeit one that might have also been said in 2016. As he put it:
When you post your interview, they'll say, 'Hey, why is she only talking to Zac and an empty chair?'
Even though Cena himself wasn’t directly responsible for his entrance theme “The Time Is Now” becoming as solid an Internet gotcha as the RickRoll, nor for the many doctored images playing on his “You Can’t See Me” catchphrase, he deserves the credit for putting the ingredients out there for fans to utilize with alche-meme. I’d say it was Nostradamus-like, but you can’t see a thing like that coming.
Now let's all give a big salute to one of the best Cena gags out there.
John Cena received quite a bit of attention from critics’ takes on Ricky Stanicky, which is available to stream with an Amazon Prime subscription, and one can only hope the laughs keep coming in his future roles in Paul Feig’s Grand Theft Lotto (which also stars fellow former Ken Simu Liu and Akwafina) and Ilya Naishuller’s action-comedy Heads of State (which also stars Idris Elba, Carla Gugino, Jack Quaid and more). And we’ll continue hoping for an eventual release for Coyote vs. Acme, even though it looks like that won't happen.
