John Cena’s turn to villain took the WWE: Unreal crew by surprise

The turn to villain of the 17-time World Champion, John Cena, is undoubtedly one of the most shocking moments in the history of wrestling. Despite the subsequent run with that role not meeting expectations, the reality is that no fan will forget the moment when Cena treacherously attacked Cody Rhodes to embrace the dark side.

In an interview with Wrestling Republic, Chris Webster, director of the WWE Unreal docuseries, has opened up about how the moment was experienced within the filming team. The series, which covers how the backstage was during the beginning of this year up to WrestleMania, dedicates practically a whole episode to talk about the process of gestation of the turn to villain of the West Newbury native. In it, the secrecy surrounding one of the biggest plot twists in wrestling history is shown, to the point that it involved Nick Khan, Triple H, Cody Rhodes, The Rock, Travis Scott, and John Cena until they practically came out on stage.

During the interview, Webster affirms that he sensed something big was going to happen at the end of the Elimination Chamber show, but they couldn't expect what actually ended up happening. Although they were already warned that they would be very surprised by the event, the decision to turn Cena into a villain caught everyone off guard.

"I think the hardest part was something like the heel turn... it was such a big and secretive story for them, that it was one of the few things we had no knowledge of. I was in Toronto for the Chamber, and I thought Cody was going to turn heel that night. Not from direct information, just from my intuition and the direction the story was taking. It all made sense," he confessed.

The level of secrecy surrounding that decision was such that the team itself could hardly document any images of how the moment backstage was experienced, so they had to improvise and make the best of the situation. "When I found out like 15 minutes before it was really going to happen, I thought: 'Damn, we have nothing... what are we going to do if we don't have images of the biggest twist of the year?'. These limits and challenges generate ideas... knowing that we had to create something with very little material and turn it into what I believe is the most powerful part of the series... was a difficult challenge to achieve, but we did it," Webster explained.

Seeing the positive reception WWE Unreal has had on Netflix, a second season of the series has already been confirmed. According to the latest reports, work is already underway on the production of this new batch of episodes, and some details of the approach that will be given and who some of the protagonists will be are already known.