After a quarter of a century in wrestling, John Cena is retiring from in-ring action later this year. However, the longtime WWE superstar (and recent Hollywood mainstay) has no dearth of projects to keep him busy. He’s been a part of Vin Diesel’s Fast & Furious family for two (going on three) entries. He’s hosted several game shows, including Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, Wipeout, and American Grit. He even has a leading role in the superhero series Peacemaker, which returns to Max in August. However, his latest series — Roku reality show What Drives You, which he also executive produced — stands apart.
The show, a combination of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and MTV Cribs, isn’t exactly original in format, but with Cena at the helm, it’s surprisingly fun. With the snappy editing and thumping soundtrack of mid-2000s VH1, Cena briskly introduces the concept at the start of each 20-minute episode, then picks up his celebrity guest at their home and has them drive him to a place they like to visit. That’s it. But the simplicity results in surprising intimacy, much of which is owed to Cena’s self-deprecating charm.
As it happens, the first four guests on the show are much like Cena himself: people whose careers have hopped the line between wrestling and other Hollywood ventures. There’s YouTube star Logan Paul, who found recent in-ring success as WWE’s United States Champion. There’s Mike “The Miz” Mizanin, who started out on MTV’s The Real World, broke into wrestling through WWE’s reality show Tough Enough, and eventually competed in the main event of WrestleMania (against Cena, no less). There are also musical artists like country rapper Jelly Roll and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, who have performed on some of WWE’s biggest stages.
But does that make What Drives You a wrestling show, or even a wrestling-adjacent one? Not quite. Cena had some interesting opinions on the subject during our chat, many of which he expressed in distinctly automotive metaphors; for instance, wrestling occupying a “parking spot” in people’s brains. (Whether it’s media training or simply Freudian, it’s a delightful quirk.) He also had illuminating thoughts on how the series’ camera setup bolsters its authenticity — and what that word even means in the age of reality TV and, as WWE is often called, “sports entertainment.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mashable: Wrestling is everywhere, especially with the recent expansion of WWE to Netflix, but it’s been everywhere for a while. Your four initial guests on What Drives You all have something or the other to do with wrestling. Was that your intent going in as an executive producer, or is that just how it worked out?
John Cena: It’s more the second, I think. WWE, and sports entertainment in general, casts a very wide net and affects a lot of people. Man, I have never met anyone who hasn’t had some sort of wrestling story, or sports entertainment story. They might talk about a certain era, like “I remember Hacksaw Jim Duggan, or Hulk Hogan, or the Undertaker.” But it seems like everyone has a parking spot in their brain for sports entertainment. It just reaches a lot of folks, and it’s also an environment where we welcome any and all guests to come in and be part of the energy and enthusiasm.
The show uses automobiles as an inroad to people’s lives. Do you see cars as an expression of people’s personalities, almost in the way that a costume or a theme music might be in wrestling?
You’re close to the mark with me. I think we’re all human, and in this human part of our brain system lives snap judgment. So you see a car, see someone driving it, and make assumptions about them. And I really like being able to subdue your snap judgment, especially if it’s in a case that’s nonthreatening to your existence, because you’ll end up learning something. You learn if you are absolutely right, or if you were misguided a little, or you didn’t get the whole picture.
I believe a car is like a fashion choice, and it does say something about us. It doesn’t mean you have to drive a Hypercar or a pickup truck or, heck, even own a car. You can take a rideshare and you can have people make assumptions. But as long as you don’t speak in absolutes, and ask questions, you give your guests a chance to respond. And in that back and forth is where you get to know people, and that’s what the show’s all about.
Past that snap judgment, the exterior of the car, you have the interior where these intimate conversations take place. What’s it like for you to have to create that sense of intimacy? You’ve hosted shows before, but this is one where you’re ceding space for other people’s stories. How do you make people feel comfortable enough to open up to you?
The environment does a lot of the work. If we do an in-person press interview for, let’s say, a movie junket, there’s a camera pointed at me, a camera pointed at you. There’s a person behind my camera, there’s a person behind your camera. They have us both lit quite brightly. The seat might be comfortable, it might not be comfortable. There’s a boom mic hanging over each of us. People don’t understand, because they just see the nice shot. But because we filmed this all in a car, the cameras were super small. They’re mounted in a place that can’t block the driver’s vision. The car’s mic is deep in the console. We can get sound, but it’s not obstructive. And it’s an environment that our guests are familiar with.
You just lose yourself in the drive. Honestly, it’s one of the easiest environments, because you forget you’re even being filmed. I think that’s what led to some great conversation. You don’t feel the bright lights because it’s not that type of show. I’m not trying to put pressure on [the guests] to do a bit, or entertain the audience. Once you shut the doors of the car, man, it was just us.
It was striking how personal and authentic a lot of it gets. Between your appearances in films, in wrestling, and also what we’re doing now, the media sit-downs, there’s a need to be authentic. But at the same time, do you ever find there being pressure to put forth a manufactured authenticity? You’ve come up in wrestling, where there’s a very weird blurred line between reality and fiction.
I’ve been fortunate enough where entertainment has been really good to me. I’m finally retiring from the WWE after almost 25 years. And after that amount of time, if you’re putting on a veneer, people eventually see through it. I don’t think there is such a thing as manufactured authenticity. I think those things are so juxtaposed that it would either be manufactured or authentic.
We have a saying in WWE: The people who connect with the audience the most are people whose personalities you get, just kind of turned up to 11. I really think that rings true. I think the people that connect with the audience the most are their most authentic selves.
Because if you are a success in the WWE, you spend a lot of time with the audience, and our audience is really smart, and they’ll be able to see through it.
I’ve been lucky enough to be on a long drive, and over that course of time, maybe I’ve tried out certain facets of a personality, or made some mistakes when I’ve made choices that weren’t exactly authentic. But over the long haul, because it’s been such a journey, you kind of get me for who I am.
What Drives You premieres Jan. 21 on the Roku Channel.
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The new Roku series starring John Cena, “What Drives You,” features Logan Paul, Jelly Roll, The Miz, and more.
