John Cena isn’t afraid to talk about his decision to get a hair transplant, regardless of the stigma around it.
In a new interview with PEOPLE on Wednesday, the Peacemaker star opened up about how getting the treatment created new possibilities for his career.
Cena shared that his decision to pursue the treatment was influenced by fan commentary — both negative and positive — much like his decision to retire from pro wrestling. “They’re the reason for my optimism, my perseverance, my passion,” he noted, adding, “They don’t let you get away with phoning it in, because they’ll eat you alive.”
The former WWE champion recalled reading signs that said, “The bald John Cena,’ even as he ruled the ring as the most decorated professional wrestler of all time.
“As I was trying to hide my hair loss, the audience was bringing it to light,” he quipped. “They pushed me into going to see what my options were. I now have a routine: red-light therapy, minoxidil, vitamins, shampoo, conditioner — and I also got a hair transplant last November.”
Although Cena has no qualms about discussing the treatment nowadays, he admitted that the public stigma prevented him from making the move years ago.
“I hate the fact that if there wasn’t so much shame around it, I’d have gotten it done 10 years ago,” he noted. “I thought I was alone, but seven or eight out of 10 [men] suffer from thinning or baldness. They don’t do anything except move your hair, one by one, from one area to another.”
Almost a year after the treatment and Cena shared that he gets “fired up” about the topic. “If somebody’s going to sweat me for that, I don’t think there’s any shame in that,” he told the publication. “It completely changed the course of my life.”
But it’s more than just a hairstyle for the Heads of State star — it’s an acting aid.
“A different hairstyle can identify a part that can get me more work, do the thing I love to do,” he shared.
Cena gets to show off his mane of hair while playing Peacemaker, the egotistical vigilante that made his debut in 2021’s Suicide Squad and now leads the acclaimed HBO Max series also starring Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, and Jennifer Holland.
During the DC show’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con last month, director James Gunn debuted a new trailer for season 2 of the series, which will explore how Peacemaker struggles to be taken seriously by the metahuman community. Peacemaker season 2 follows the events of Gunn’s Superman, which the director previously told Entertainment Weekly helped to weave the installment into the larger overall universe organically.
“I developed it along the way, in conjunction with the other DC projects that we’re doing, so it’s very much connected to Superman and it’s very much connected to what comes after,” Gunn said. “I had a rough idea of what I was going to do, but it was actually quite different than what the show ended up being.”
He continued, “He’s still considered a punchline among all of the other metahumans, so he’s starting the season in a bad place. As are all of our heroes, all of the 11th Street kids — well, everybody but Vigilante [Freddie Stroma], who just always seems to be okay with everything.”
Gun revealed that it’s also been “a couple years” on the show since the events of the finale, but he’s keeping the timeline vague on purpose. “I see how difficult, after all my time at Marvel, it is to make things truly fit together, so it’s an unspecified amount of a couple of years,” he adds.
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The season 2 trailer already revealed some big Superman cameos: Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl, and Sean Gunn’s Maxwell Lord. But Gunn revealed there’s even more connections to DC’s big screen reset coming in Peacemaker.
“You’ve seen what we call the QUC, the Quantum Unfolding Chamber, in the first season of Peacemaker, and we see more about that technology in Superman,“ he said. “The QUC is the center of the story in Peacemaker season 2… We see a lot of different characters from Superman in the [season], [including] Isabela and Nathan and Sean, and then we see a bunch of other characters later on in the season from other parts of the DCU and from Superman. There might even be one really, really, really big cameo near the end of the show.”
Peacemaker returns to TV on Aug. 21, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on HBO Max.
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