John Cena Changed His ‘Bumblebee’ Character From the Script

Bumblebee presented viewers with a totally unique take on the Transformers universe, and it looks like one element of that was in a bit of flux.

In a recent interview with ScreenRant, John Cena spoke about his character in the film, Sector 7’s Agent Burns. As Cena revealed, Burns evolved a bit from the script to the film itself, largely thanks to director Travis Knight giving the wrestler-turned-actor opportunities to improvise.

“[The character was initially] like the Dragnet guys, that’s how it was written.” Cena explained. “I usually try to take those moments [of improvisation] to make the crew laugh or have fun for myself, because I’m given that one take. But a lot of that, he really observed that, ‘Hey, I can’t use what you just said in the movie, but I can use your sentiment in the movie. So give me the same tone, just don’t curse as much.’”

While it sounds like some of Cena’s improvised takes definitely didn’t make it into Bumblebee, he hinted that he thinks it helped audiences take more of a liking to the character of Burns.

“[it was a] weird combination where you have this mysterious character – but in the script, it makes perfect sense.” Cena added. “Then you decide to give him a bit of a dynamic personality profile and now it’s more intriguing.”

Given how events unfolded in Bumblebee, that sort of intriguing turn definitely proved to be the case with Agent Burns. While he ended up taking the side of Bumblebee and Charlie (Hailee Steinfeld) in the film’s third act, there’s no telling if he could appear in whatever the franchise has in store.

“Reboot, I always hate that word because, for one, I’m not sure I really understand what it means,” franchise producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura said in a previous interview. “We are going to do another big Transformers movie. It is going to be different than the ones that we’ve done before.”

“It’s not like we look at the elements of what we did before and go, ‘Well, let’s not do this’ or ‘Let’s not do that,’” Di Bonaventura explained. “It’s more about how do you evolve the experience for the fans. Let the fan have a new experience. When we did the first movie, at first there was a lot of pushback that we weren’t doing it the way it was done before,” he added. “My feeling was always that if we’d done it, you would’ve gone, ‘Well, I’ve already seen it.’ So how do you evolve things forward is I think the hardest thing because you’ve got to retain why people love it, but at the same time if you give them the same experience, they’re going to be bored with it.”

Bumblebee is in theaters now.