Of all the scuzzy misfit superheroes featured in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker didn’t immediately leap out as a character in need of a spin-off. A blustering simpleton whose dedication to making the world safe for peace usually leads to him killing everyone in his path, Peacemaker seemed like a one-joke character—albeit a funny one, as expertly played by a stonefaced John Cena. But a late-film moment of violence in which he takes the life of one of his teammates forces him to consider, seemingly for the first time, that he might be the bad guy. It casts a shadow over everything that came before and raises a question that haunts Peacemaker, the HBO Max series in which Gunn and Cena return to the character: What happens to a mindless killing machine once he starts looking inside and questioning why he does what he does?
Peacemaker has turned that into a surprisingly resonant question, letting Cena find hidden depths throughout a season that sees Peacemaker leaving prison, trying to pick up the pieces of his life, confronting the legacy of the White Dragon, his white supremacist supervillain father (Robert Patrick), and maybe actually saving the world by joining a group of government operatives working to undo a sinister plot. Maybe. As the season progresses, it becomes clear that Peacemaker is in as morally murky territory as ever, though not so murky he can’t rock out to the glam metal songs that soundtrack some of the series’ most memorable action scenes.
Cena’s at the center of the show and the actor is set to continue his collaboration by starring in Coyote vs. Acme, an upcoming riff on the classic Looney Tunes character Gunn is producing. (Peacemaker itself was just renewed for a second season, too.) But a supporting cast that includes Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stromare, Chukwudi Iwuji, Steve Agee and Jennifer Holland allows Gunn to fashion an ensemble piece about misfit heroes forced to work together, a form he knows well as the writer/director of both The Suicide Squad and two (soon to be three) Guardians of the Galaxy films. The set-up also allows Gunn to balance some weighty themes against crudely funny repartee and over-the-top violence, two other well-established areas of expertise. Speaking to GQ ahead of Peacemaker’s finale, Gunn talked about the adjustments needed to make the switch from movies to TV, how he learned to love hair metal, and realizing that Cena had more to offer as a dramatic actor than anyone had suspected.
Watching The Suicide Squad, it felt like any number of its characters could get a spin-off. Why did Peacemaker leap out to you?
I think the first and most real answer is just, I love John Cena. I just really love the guy. I love working with people who are incredibly talented, and I saw something in John while we were working on The Suicide Squad that I thought I could help bring out of him, which was this more vulnerable side of his personality and his performance. I was able to craft the show around that, his sense of humor, and the way he talks. I also found the character of Peacemaker really interesting and relevant to our times, more so, in many ways, than the other characters in The Suicide Squad. And I love finding the humanity in kind of shitty characters.
What about Cena allows him to express that?
I guess it takes a certain kind of performer to be able to do that. With John, my job as a director is really to act as a sculptor with an actor like him. He’s been a professional entertainer for a long time and has a lot of things he’s just trying to chip away and get to the rawness and the realness. He’s trying to show that we have this vulnerable, kind of sensitive soul trapped in the body of this guy who is stuck with the ideals of his parents and the world around him, which are just complete shit. Peacemaker’s also reacting to the trauma of his childhood with a sort of hypermasculine bluster that puts everyone off. And I think, in some ways, that’s the reason it exists: to put everyone off. Because I think the guy doesn’t want to be close to other people.
You kept some elements of Peacemaker’s comic book origin story while bringing in many of your own. How did the conception of him being a working class guy with a white supremacist father come about?
I think it was at the very, very, very beginning. First of all, I wrote the show quickly—eight episodes in two months. I wrote the first script in a few days, so everything was kind of set in stone by that time. I know that even before I wrote the first script I saw Robert Patrick on Perry Mason and was like, “Oh, fuck yeah.” He looks like my grandpa. He would be great as Peacemaker’s dad.” So I wrote the role for him. And I think that was a way of modernizing who are today’s Nazis. What do today’s Nazis look like? In the original comic, in the middle stretch, Peacemaker’s father was a Nazi, but he was from the 1940s.
You deal with a lot of violently racist characters in this and characters, like Peacemaker, who are working through their own history of insensitivity. How do you portray that without coming off as insensitive yourself?
It was a struggle. I didn’t want to be insensitive to the viewers; I don’t want to be putting the White Dragon out there as some sort of hero and I didn’t want the White Dragon to be saying stuff that was going to be hurtful to people. But at times, you do do that anyway, because you have a total piece of shit who’s talking like a total piece of shit. And so, he is what he is. I think that the only answer I have to that, is that I’m cognizant of it. I’m conscious and I’m trying to do my best to thread the needle of being sensitive to people, but also telling an authentic story.
I also often see sort of supermarket Nazis on TV that are just these cut-and-dried people who look like Nazis or sound kind of like Nazis, but they don’t have any real philosophy or any real belief system or they never say anything bad. There’s an antiseptic quality to that that’s as offensive as going too far in the other direction. So I wanted to really just find the balance there, and I tried my best to do it. I feel like I have, at least from the reactions of most people online. It doesn’t seem to be a place where Peacemaker pushes people’s buttons.
There’s also always some kind of pushback within the show, like with Peacemaker’s relationship with Adebayo. They’re both characters who are working through parental issues, which is a theme that kind of runs through your work. What makes that such a rich area for you to explore?
I think all of us are very sensitive about our relationship with our parents or about our lack of a relationship with our parents. It’s a real way to get to the core of people’s issues. I don’t think who our parents are defines us, but I do think it affects all of us. I think that’s true in the case of those two characters who both have parents who are sort of really power hungry people. And, obviously, in many ways they are very, very different, but in some ways, they’re pretty cutthroat and power hungry and that makes them similar.
How did you decide to go all in on glam metal for this? Was that a part of your own musical upbringing?
I mean, it’s from my era but I was really a punk rock kid in the eighties. I loved some of the bands in there—when Hanoi Rocks came around, I was really, really into Hanoi Rocks, because they had a mix of punk rock and things that I liked from Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, and the Rolling Stones. I was also a pretty big Mötley Crüe fan when Mötley Crüe came around, because they all had that feeling of being former punk rock kids who had gotten into rock and roll and metal.
Like a lot of kids, I made fun of a lot of hair metal, I didn’t respect it, but in the last few years I have been on a search to find the stuff from that era that was really good, which is like the bands that I liked, like Hanoi Rocks and Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe, but also bands that maybe I didn’t respect quite as much back then. Really listening to them, you find out that a lot of these guys were really great musicians who were writing really great pop songs and that the makeup and the showiness of it all really didn’t detract from their musical ability. Bands like Cinderella I didn’t really listen to when I was younger or have any respect for—I didn’t like their name, and now I think they’re really just fantastic musicians.
Many of the bands on the soundtrack are actually guys who are putting out music today, like Wigwam and The Cruel Intentions. All of those bands are European bands, Scandinavian bands that have kept playing sleaze rock since that time and are amazing, amazing bands. And I think their music, in general, is much better than the music back then, because there’s no pretense of seriousness about it. The pomposity and the seriousness of bands with the makeup and the big hair and all that is sort of gone. They really know what they’re doing and have been turning out some really fantastic music.
Did anything open up for you, writing for television versus writing for a film?
Tons. I found it hugely creatively satisfying. A movie is a slave to the plot, and a TV show is a slave to the character. With movies you always have to be pushing forward, so you have to cut excess just constantly. It’s like this scene and next scene and next scene, it really pushes forward because people get bored very easily with the movie for whatever reason. But with a TV show, you get to know these people, you get to hang out with them. You want to experience life through them and with them, and it gives you more time for more comedy, more drama, more exploring of the nuances of the relationships. That’s the thing I probably enjoy the most. There’s just a little bit more of a relaxed feel to television that I feel like serves me very well as a writer and as a creator.
And in releasing the show, I have really enjoyed releasing an episode every week. I mean, there were all those people at the beginning, who were upset because we’re not releasing all the episodes at once, because people have gotten used to that. But I really love the community feel of waiting for that next episode, of leaving people with a cliffhanger and then being able to talk with everybody about every new episode.
Like many of your movies it’s very much an ensemble show. Are you more comfortable writing for an ensemble than for like a single focal character?
Yes. I don’t know if I’m more comfortable with it but I think that I am very comfortable with it. I grew up with a family with six children, seven years apart. I grew up in an ensemble, so it’s easy for me to write multiple voices at one time. It’s not a difficult thing for me. It comes very naturally. And I also think that, for TV anyway, it works very well, being able to have different people who speak in different ways and you fall in love with the characters in different ways. I mean, they all have pretty major issues and they all do a lot of bad things. But they all do a lot of good things too. Except for bad guys.