wrestling / News

Freddie Prinze Jr. Says John Cena Gave Him a Hard Time

June 22, 2016 | Posted by Larry Csonka

– Freddie Prinze Jr. recently appeared on Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast (transcript via wrestlinginc ), here are the highlights…

On Changing Promo Class Into an Acting Workshop: “They did something called a promo class and he would have kids come up, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this before. He would have two wrestlers come up, two talent come up, and he would give them a scenario and force them to improv. But a lot of them didn’t have any experience in that. And so I get throwing kids in the deep end of the pool.” Prinze continued, “so I just spoke with him, like, ‘look, man, you’re using verbiage they don’t understand and this is something that I went through as a student and know certain directors could affect me better than others. Let me do the things that were done in my acting class with them and it will sort of break them down to the point where they feel like it’s safe to fail because it sucks failing in front of your peers and in front of your boss.’ So once I had the room and I told everybody, like, ‘Vince doesn’t see any of this. We’re not recording this.’ I was communicating with Vince [about] who I thought was strong, who I thought he should give a chance to, who I thought was weak. But I didn’t tell them that. I wanted them to feel safe and comfortable to fail because my whole thing with live TV is, if you’re afraid you’re going to screw up, you’re going to screw up.”

On John Cena Giving Him a Hard Time: “I would be running an acting workshop and he would just come in and interrupt it and sort of take over the room. And I’m like, ‘hold up, man.’ I said, ‘let’s go talk outside’. So he came outside and he gave me this speech, and I respect his view. He goes, ‘look, I may be a neanderthal’ and he said, ‘but you either got it or you don’t’. And I said, ‘look, I agree, philosophically, to a certain point.’ I said, ‘but you can get better or worse at something depending on how hard you work at it.’ I said, ‘you don’t need my help. I’m not writing for you. But they do, so let me do my job. I’ll let you do your job and that’ll be that.’ And it wasn’t.”