Peacemaker has arrived on HBO Max, reuniting director James Gunn with John Cena’s character from the hit DC film The Suicide Squad. “He was always a character that was on the periphery of characters that I found sort of interesting and strange,” James Gunn explained at a TCA press conference about the new series. “And he had a really goofy helmet that made him memorable, so that's why I put him in The Suicide Squad originally.”
(HBO Max)
“I was not planning to do it at all,” James Gunn added about his involvement in the series, which includes creator, writer, and executive producer in addition to director. “Peter Safran came to me and Walter Hamada from DC and they were like, ‘Hey, if you could do a TV show on any one of the characters from The Suicide Squad, who would you do?’ And I just found something really interesting about Peacemaker, both because I loved working with John Cena and I thought that 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 I thought he was just a really cool, interesting character that could be pertinent to today and today's world, in terms of his backwards way of looking at things. And a lot of the show is about his friendship with these other characters, especially Danielle's character, Leota Adebayo, and their friendship that emerges out of all of this, even though they very much represent very different parts of America today.”
“I'm really grateful that James Gunn wrote this character and had me in mind for it,” Danielle Brooks shared, who plays Leota Adebayo, who found her character very relatable. “It's very much like me where she was trying to fake it 'til she made it. She probably never held a gun, I had never really dealt with guns, either. But there's such a thrill and an excitement that comes with being a badass or even attempting to be a badass. And I think she leaned into it until she was like I don't know if I can really do this.”
“One of the things that made me want to tell the story of Peacemaker is that he has a lot to learn,” James Gunn added about the dynamic between John Cena’s character and Adebayo. “At the end of The Suicide Squad, Bloodsport learns a lot. He’s a better person than he was at the beginning. A lot of the characters are much better than they were at the beginning, and Peacemaker has a lot to learn, and it wouldn’t take just one season of TV for him to learn that. But it is that ability to learn that he does have, I believe, as a character, and it’s that ability to learn that, for me, makes him a little bit more likeable. And his blind spots are pretty terrible, and then some places are just him being ignorant, and I think that’s an important distinction to make as well. He is open at the same time, but we get to see that journey. It’s just very, very basic. Peacemaker is almost every guy that I grew up with in Missouri. He isn't that much different than a lot of people I know, so I don’t find him like — as terrible as he is at times, he’s also kind of common. And I think that telling that story for a guy like that with those blind spots is important because everybody on TV is either totally good and totally perfect or they’re evil, often times. Obviously, there’s a lot of great shows that aren’t like that. But I think that it’s fun to make a superhero especially, or supervillain, or whatever you want to think of him as, that has a lot of nuances.”
“I’ve learned two things about James Gunn through our relationship,” John Cena revealed about working with the director. “One, he’s obsessed with my tighty-whities and, two, he always wants to make me dance. So you can watch this on HBO Max and if they like it, for sure, you’d more than likely see me in tighty-whities and dancing in the future.”
The dancing comes alongside the show’s 80s rock soundtrack. “This was a soundtrack I was probably the most excited to create since the Guardians of the Galaxy 1 soundtrack, and it really is all hair metal and as well as a lot of modern — It’s a lot of eighties hair metal but it’s also a lot of modern like sleaze rock and hair metal that comes out of Europe and a lot of really great bands that people don’t know about, and I love that stuff, but there’s also a lot of really bad hair metal, so it was fun finding the really good stuff to inject the series with its flavor, which we keep throughout the whole first season.”
As for what the future holds, this introductory season of Peacemaker includes eight episodes, the first three of which are now streaming. “I definitely have 87 seasons of Peacemaker planned out,” James Gunn joked when asked about what comes next and if there’s any potential for more series that spin out of The Suicide Squad. “It’s a deep world.”
You can step inside the world of Peacemaker with the triple episode premiere now on HBO Max. New episodes will be released on Thursdays through February 17th.