James Gunn Reveals Origin of Peacemaker's Bisexuality Storyline

By Jenna Anderson

HBO Max's Peacemaker has been surprising audiences at virtually every turn, all while peeling back the narrative onion that is Christopher Smith / Peacemaker (John Cena). One of the most buzzed-about revelations of the series is that Chris is actually bisexual, something that had been teased periodically throughout the season before being confirmed outright in last week's seventh episode. In a recent interview with Empire Magazine (via /Film), series creator and writer James Gunn revealed how that character detail came to be, and credited Cena himself with adding it.

"She is his polar opposite in so many ways, politically. She's a Black, gay woman," Gunn said of Danielle Brooks' Leota Adebayo. "He's a white, straight — nah, he's not straight — white, whatever-he-is male. And yet they really like each other. They have a lot in common. [...] Peacemaker is an interesting character because he's so f-cked-up in so many ways, and then in other ways, he is kind of weirdly forward-thinking. John does improv all the time, and he just turned Christopher Smith into this hyper-sexualized dude that is open to anything sexually. I was surprised by that. But I thought, 'I guess it makes sense that this guy isn't one-dimensional.'"

In Episode 7, as his father, Auggie Smith (Robert Patrick) began to fight him as the White Dragon, Auggie monologued about all the ways his son had disappointed him. Among them was that Chris "slept with the whores of polluted blood, and men." This served as the most concrete confirmation yet that Chris is not straight, something that the show had been sprinkling in for some time. In the series' very first scene, Chris remarked that he had "no problem" with the idea of Aquaman sleeping with men, but would be offended if he really slept with fish. Later on in that episode, Chris had an awkward heart-to-heart with Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), in which he remarked that he hadn't been intimate with "anyone" since being in prison, and then corrected himself mid-sentence to say that he hadn't "been with any woman."

"It's the first time I've ever taken an IP or a character into an extended look besides WWE's John Cena," Cena told ComicBook.com earlier this year of working on the series. "So that's really fun, to be able to embrace the patience of not having to rush through everything in an hour and 45 minutes to two and a half hours. It's a different approach, but it's one that I like because I like being able to take a breath and soak in the nuances of what it might be going on. So it is a different approach, but it's one that I prefer."

New episodes of Peacemaker debut Thursdays exclusively on HBO Max.

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