John Cena Reflects On Calling Taiwan A Country, ‘I F*cked Up’

In 2021, during a promotional tour for F9, John Cena was doing an ad read in Mandarin and referred to Taiwan as a country. Cena issued an apology for his mistake.

Speaking to Joe Rogan, Cena reflected on what happened and his mistake.

“I got put in a bit of a hot spot. I made a pact to myself when I felt fluent. We would do these global press tours and I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to do 70% of my media in Mandarin.’ I did. I went over there, spoke, people were taking off the translator headphones, and life was good. Everything was great. At the very end of the day, as with all these press tours, you do a bunch of prompter reads. I’m doing prompter reads for everywhere. ‘Go to this place and see this movie. Go to this place.’ My bad, I didn’t check the reads because it’s the end of a ten-hour day, doing a million of these things. One of them said, ‘Hey, Taiwan, see this.’ It was all in Mandrin. It described Tiwain as a country. ‘Be the first country to see this.’ Over there, they look through a different lens. Geopolitics are murky waters. That’s what I learned. I said it, left, everyone was cool, I did my thing. I read the prompt. It was a Ron Burgundy moment. I thought, ‘Good job, John. You did 70% and people knew what you were talking about.’ Then they put that out and everyone was like, ‘What the fuck did you just say? That’s not how we do it over here.’ It was a pretty tense moment for me. I had to apologize to China. In apologizing to China, I pissed off my home country. No one was happy. It was murky waters for me personally. It’s weird. I think I might have been the only guy to almost get canceled for doing his homework. We can learn from every mistake. My mistake was, just because you know the language, doesn’t mean you know the culture. It was a cool lesson. It sucked, because I was trying to do something good, but it was a cool lesson,” he said.

Cena recalled telling James Gunn that if he needed to fire him from Peacemaker after the incident, he understood.

Rogan said that this wasn’t Cena’s fault as he was simply reading the prompt.

Cena replied, “I do appreciate you saying, ‘It’s not your fault.’ That’s not true. It was my fault. That’s when I can start to work on, ‘What did I learn from this?’ I can easily blame PR, an assistant. I could say somebody had a target on my back. All that stuff. I fucked up.”

Cena learned Mandarin by taking WWE up on an offer to learn a new language.

Fans can find more coverage of John Cena on his media tour ahead of his retirement match here.

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