There’s No Peace for PEACEMAKER as John Cena’s Character Pines For Respect in His Own Show

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Poor PEACEMAKER – the character, not the show – just can’t get any respect. In the first episode of the highly anticipated HBO Max series – which debuts Thursday, Jan. 13 with the first three episodes, only on Crave – the title character, played by John Cena, is meeting with some new work colleagues in a restaurant. He shows up in full superhero garb. “A bright red shirt and white pants aren’t exactly conducive to lurking in the shadows,” snorts John Economos, played by Steve Agee. “People see this uniform, it strikes fear in their hearts,” PEACEMAKER protests. “What people? The other people at the Village People tryouts?” quips Emilia Harcourt, played by Jennifer Holland. PEACEMAKER – real name Christopher Smith – wants to be recognized and appreciated as a superhero, not only by his colleagues, but by the general public, and even by his own father. But many see him as a supervillain, or an arrogant, out-of-touch jerk, or worst of all, kind of a joke. But there’s a compelling innocence to him as well, and his noble quest to do his version of what he believes is right is at the heart of PEACEMAKER, which continues the story of the DC Comics character that Cena first portrayed in the 2021 film The Suicide Squad. PEACEMAKER is written by James Gunn, who also directed five of the eight episodes, including the first one. Gunn, of course, also wrote and directed The Suicide Squad. “This was always a character that was on the periphery of characters that I found sort of interesting and strange, and he had a really goofy helmet that made him memorable, so that’s why I put him in The Suicide Squad originally,” Gunn said during a virtual panel interview. “I just found something really interesting about PEACEMAKER, first because I loved working with John Cena, and I thought he had a lot of acting gifts and comedy gifts that we weren’t able to fully utilize in the movie. And then also because this was just a really cool character that could be pertinent to today’s world, in terms of his sort of backwards way of looking at things.” Gunn said a lot of the show’s subtleties revolve around how the main character slowly develops relationships with some of the other characters, especially Leota Adebayo, played by Danielle Brooks. “They have a friendship that emerges out of all this, even though they very much represent very different parts of America today,” Gunn explained. “Peacemaker has a lot of issues. I don’t sit down and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got to make this character likeable.’ I just try to make a character as fully fledged as possible. One of the things, though, that made me want to tell the story of PEACEMAKER is that he has a lot to learn, and it wouldn’t take just one season of TV for him to learn that. But I believe as a character he has an ability to learn, which makes him a little bit more likeable. His blindspots are pretty terrible in some places, and then in other places it’s just him being ignorant, and I think that’s an important distinction to make as well. He is open at the same time, I guess, and we get to see that journey.” Of course, there are also many parts of PEACEMAKER that are not subtle at all, and that’s the biggest chunk of the fun. There’s tons of intrigue, lots of action, cool fight scenes, plenty of humour, and perhaps a surprising amount of dancing, in various states of undress. “As far as my dancing goes, I’ve learned two things about James Gunn through our relationship:  One, he’s obsessed with my tighty-whities, and two, he always wants to make me dance,” Cena said. “So people can watch this, and if they like it, for sure, you’ll more than likely see more of me in tighty-whities, and dancing, in the future.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv