Published Sep 7, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT
Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.
For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider’s news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.
He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.
His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan’s work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.
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For nearly two decades, WWE fans wondered what a genuinely evil John Cena would look like. The company repeatedly resisted pulling the trigger while Cena was its biggest babyface, despite the fact that there were fewer superstars than him getting bigger boos. But all that finally changed in 2025, when Cena stunned the wrestling world by turning heel alongside The Rock at Elimination Chamber. While it’s perhaps best we forget about how that ultimately went down, Cena has now revealed that WWE came considerably closer to giving him a heel turn more than a decade earlier than fans realized.
Speaking to audiences at Fan Expo Tampa, where Collider’s Maggie Lovitt** **was in attendance, Cena revealed that his abandoned heel character had its own “Fear My Name” branding, new entrance music, wrestling robes, boots, and 10 new outfits — all of which were scrapped before audiences ever saw them. Cena revealed the details while answering a fan who asked how much preparation went into his eventual 2025 heel turn. While he doesn’t consider himself the most naturally gifted performer, the 17-time world champion believes preparation has always been one of his biggest strengths. He told fans:
“I will never classify myself as the most talented in anything. You guys have seen my work. Michael Cole has politely called me unorthodox as far as my running style and my wrestling ability. I think there’s people that can talk circles around me. One thing I do put myself at the top of the ladder on is preparedness.”
Cena used his original proposed heel turn during his rivalry with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Moana) as the ultimate example. The pair were preparing for their heavily promoted “Once in a Lifetime” encounter at WrestleMania XXVIII in Miami when Vince McMahon floated the possibility of Cena finally becoming a villain. “When I wrestled Dwayne Johnson ‘Once in a Lifetime’ down in Miami, Vince McMahon was like, ‘Hey, we might turn you heel. We might.’ He left it at that. Nothing,” said Cena. “I went away from that meeting. I recorded new theme music. I got 10 new outfits made. I got wrestling robes made. I got wrestling boots made. I had the WWE file for the trademark ‘Fear My Name’ that never got used. None of this stuff got used.”
A lot of this is already known, but a little nugget of gold that Cena dropped was when he revealed that he was already rehearsing how this alternative version of himself would physically behave. And there was a hint of **Ric Flair **about things. “I practiced walking, like how I would move through space in the new singlet and robe. I practiced my mannerisms, how I would carry myself,” said Cena. “It never came to fruition. He came back four weeks later and said, ‘We’re not doing it. We’re scrapping it.’” Cena has discussed the abandoned turn before, revealing that he recorded different entrance music and devised a presentation designed to be the opposite of his familiar WWE character. However, his latest comments offer new insight into how extensively he prepared the “Fear My Name” persona, and the contrast between then and 2025 is all the more striking as a result.
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.
The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.
You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
The contrast with 2025 is particularly striking. More than a decade after WWE abandoned “Fear My Name,” Cena finally turned heel at Elimination Chamber in Toronto, attacking Cody Rhodes and aligning himself with The Rock. He subsequently defeated Rhodes at WrestleMania 41 to capture his record-breaking 17th world championship. This time, however, Cena says he received very little warning. The idea emerged only days before Elimination Chamber. He told fans:
“The idea for the heel turn kind of came out of nowhere. They wanted to do something special for Toronto. They knew they could get some stars in there. They called me up and asked me if I wanted to go in this direction a few days before the show, and I said, ‘Yes!’”
That immediately sent Cena back into preparation mode as he attempted to understand what would motivate a character who had spent two decades telling audiences to “Never Give Up” to suddenly turn against them. “That started the prep for all of that. I had to, in my mind, research: ‘Why am I doing this? What’s my motivation? What am I going to talk to the audience about? What am I going to talk to my opponents about?’ The amount of preparation is unexplainable.”
The 2025 turn ultimately didn’t resurrect the abandoned “Fear My Name” presentation, and Cena retained many of the visual elements associated with his established character. His latest revelation nevertheless provides a fascinating glimpse at the completely different John Cena that WWE audiences almost met during arguably the biggest rivalry of his career.
Cena officially retired from in-ring competition in 2025 after completing his WWE farewell tour. Stay tuned at Collider for more.
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Foghorn Leghorn / Daffy Duck / Porky Pig / Elmer Fudd (voice)