John Cena has been around since Vince McMahon’s era and has experienced the schedule talent had to go through. Now, talent has it easier, but they are as important as the wrestling. Speaking to Trevor Noah, he said,
“I think as performers, in a day and age where they sold it as a shoot or as real, these are real fights, the personalities had less time away from the personality. And keep in mind, in the globalization of wrestling, when Vince McMahon took over in the early ’80s, the schedule was arduous. I’m talking like 30 days on, seven days off, 30 days on, seven days off or less. And you’re doing your own promotion, so you spend more time as the IP than you do as a human.”
“So when it’s supposed to be real, you got these guys who are trying to convince fans to come in the building and see them, and they assume the role, and it’s really tough to shut the switch off. It was a steep hill to climb for wrestling, but one of the best things they did is admit that it was entertainment. It is not pure sport, because it was dishonest. Now we’re honest. So that was the mid-’90s. Tough hill to climb. You got to recorrect. You got to rebrand.”
“But the audience has always been rabid, whether they thought it was real or they know that they’re coming to a show. Wrestling has always been filmed, shot, consumed as the audience is just as important as the performer, whether you know it or not. When you look at what we do, tons of crowd shots, crowds chanting. They’re literally like European football crowds.”
“But we don’t want them to shut up. We want them to keep being as rowdy as they can, because if we perform to apathetic silence, it’s really just kind of two guys in their underwear doing stunts. We got over, and I was happy to be involved in a lot of that rebranding process.”
“Also, the product goes through phases. You cater to your audience. In the ’80s, Hulk Hogan was nationalist virtue, you know, ‘Say your prayers, eat your vitamins,’ you know, do good. And then Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Attitude Era, was drink beer, flip off your boss. And then more families started to show up around the time that I started.”
