The Rock is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Honestly, I’m still shocked.
It’s not that The Rock isn’t a good actor but when he left the WWE at the top of his game to make movies most fans were like “yeah, sure, see you in a couple months when that rock bottoms.” A ton of guys left to make movies and came right back after all the “big guy acts like a bad ass” roles dried up. For every case like The Rock and Batista (the dude is in the biggest movie of the year) there are guys like Roddy Piper and Kevin Nash, who appeared in some decent movies, but aren’t exactly getting top billing these days.
Ironically, one wrestler who did make a jump to movies (and filmed one not too long ago) is John Cena — one of the biggest wrestling superstars of all time. So, when the two squared off at Wrestlemania 28, and again at Wrestlemania 29, it should be no surprise that there was probably a little bit of animosity between the two off-camera. At that point, and still today, the WWE was John Cena’s world and The Rock was the prodigal’s son returning to the place that made him a star. It probably pissed off a lot of people in the back and not just Cena.
In a new interview with Muscle & Fitness magazine, The Rock discusses his return to the WWE back in 2012 and how he and Cena clashed in and out of the ring.
“It got really uncomfortable for a lot of people. And it gets uncomfortable for the fans–that they sense something. But then when it gets uncomfortable for the wrestlers and to the executives and the company, then it’s something special. I’d say ‘John, here’s what I’m going to say tonight: Go f— yourself.’ He’d say, ‘Well, here’s going to be my response: F— you too.’ I mean, it was like that. And it was palpable for the fans, and it was palpable backstage.”
The tension finally came to a head and there was one specific moment that The Rock considered going toe-to-toe with the leader of the Cenation. Yup, The Rock wanted to deliver his own Five Knuckle Shuffle right to Cena’s mush.
“People might think it’s not real or you run into the challenge of the potential for people to go, ‘It’s so real that it’s not real.’ But in this case it worked out very well and through all that edge and attitude and bite that we had and nearly coming to blows backstage and one night in the ring—literally we were nose-to-nose, it was any second. And through that in a crazy, weird completely unexplained way, we became great buds.”
Even though they’re friends now, if The Rock does come back for one more match with Cena he might to get his licks in where he can, probably outside the ring. He sure as hell won’t get the upper hand inside the ring.
H/T SEScoops