Despite not quite having made his official debut as a part of Universal Pictures’ street-racing-turned-spy-fi Fast Saga, John Cena is already looking for a place to pull up his WWE-sized chair at the work bench of the as-yet-untitled tenth and final installment of the primary Fast & Furious franchise. Cena joins the series at this late stage as the newly-revealed estranged brother of Dominic and Mia Toretto, and assuming that his character survives the improbable scenarios of the ninth entry – or, given the fates of Letty Ortiz and Han Lue, even if he doesn’t – he’s already itching for another lap around the track (with sources close to WGTC saying that Universal wants him back, too).
“I would be grateful for a place at the table. I hope Fast 9 is a tremendous success. I hope we get to do it again, and by we, I mean me,” he told MTV International in an interview alongside multi-Fast director Justin Lin. “I’m not putting any spoilers out there, I’m just putting my thoughts out into the universe, because if I put them out into the universe, maybe they will actually become reality.”
Cena plays Jakob Toretto in the film, a master marksman, thief, and high-performance driver who appears in the first trailer to be a distinctly antagonistic character. The actor challenges that notion, however, claiming that it’s “not true” that he’ll be Fast 9‘s villain. “We’ll leave it for the audience…to decide who’s bad and who’s good,” he says.
Franchise mainstay Vin Diesel echoes those sentiments, calling Jakob “multidimensional” and insisting that “there are no cookie-cutter characters. They all have layers.” Diesel would know, too, having taken what appeared to be a villainous turn himself in 2017’s eighth installment The Fate of the Furious, where his character’s actions were ultimately revealed to have been coerced by the behind-the-scenes cyberterrorist Cipher.
Fast 9‘s trailer includes an exchange between the returning Cipher and Jakob regarding his dynamic with his brother:
“Your whole life, you pushed yourself to be faster than Dom, smarter than Dom, stronger than Dom,” she tells him. “But could you kill him? Because I’m ready if you are.”
Even now, it seems practically inevitable that Jakob will eventually realize that his hatred of Dom is almost entirely the result of Cipher’s manipulation – assuming that the real twist isn’t that he’s always known because he’s been working as an undercover operative against her – setting the stage for the same sort of redemptive arc that Jason Statham’s character Deckard Shaw has traveled through in three movies and a cameo.
If that turns out to be the case, then there will assuredly be room for Cena in the future of the Fast Saga, which has always been, despite its extravagant vehicles, preposterous chase sequences, international super spies and wanton disregard for the laws of physics, a story about family.
Fast & Furious 9 debuts May 22nd, with one last sequel currently scheduled to premiere on April 2nd, 2021.
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