John Cena is “the most prepared actor” Peter Farrelly has ever worked with.
The 67-year-old director has returned to his comedy roots with Amazon Prime Video’s Ricky Stanicky and he revealed he knew the wrestler-turned-actor was his leading man after watching him in Peacemaker.
Farrelly told The Hollywood Reporter: “Someone called me and said, ‘Have you ever seen Peacemaker?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ That’s not normally the thing I would watch. I kept watching and was like, This guy is unbelievable. The stuff he does in that show is hysterical, and as soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘That’s Stanicky.’ I was hoping he agreed, and he did.
“It’s mostly in the script. It always is with us. Some people, they start with a loose script, and they find it. I don’t have the confidence to do that. I have to have it down and know what we’re doing. But after we get it, then we say, ‘Try this, try that’… Without question, I would say he was the most prepared actor I’ve ever worked with. On the first day, he knew the entire script from front to back, every line.”
Zac Efron also stars in the movie and Farrelly was excited to reunite with him after working on The Greatest Beer Run Ever together.
He said: “I actually met Zac probably seven, eight years ago. We were trying to get him on a project. I really liked him, and it just didn’t work out. Then Beer Run happened, and I was extremely impressed by how talented that guy is. He’s also a dream for any director because when you come to him, he’s just like, ‘What do you think? You good?’ A lot of actors, they’re in their heads. He totally trusts you, and that’s a good thing to have.”