John Cena recently sat down with Gorilla Position, ahead of his new film Bumblebee. During the conversation, Cena touched on how his time working with WWE Films required far more patience than his work in the ring. The former-WWE Champion said that going from the “instant gratification” of the ring, to the far-slower film sets of The Marine or 12 Rounds took a lot of getting used to.

Transcription via Robert Gunier at WrestlingINC.com

“In the realm of like The Marine, 12 Rounds, the early movies that I did with WWE films – and I never look back on my experiences with regret, I look back on them to try to learn from them – I always thought I could make the process go faster because that’s the environment I was familiar with,” Cena said. “You have to understand, this is like 2004-2009, these are the prime years when things were catching fire, and the place I really wanted to be was on that canvas, man because that was where I felt most comfortable. And I was still trying to learn and define who I was. Went through a character shift from the ruthless aggression guy, to the rap guy, to the non-rap guy, to the superman guy, like all that stuff happened in that time period so it was such a thriving environment because of the instant gratification. Then you get plopped in a set and you’re waiting 8 hours for a giant stunt, and you don’t understand the reason because I’m in the stunt business and I just want to fall down. But that’s not the way it works.”