There is a clip of John Cena, sixteen times a WWE champion and a man not easily intimidated, being handed a taste of Marmite and reacting like he had been tricked. His verdict is one of the more honest things any famous person has said about the spread, and it doubles as an accidental endorsement of the whole brand idea. If the man who tells children anything is possible cannot finish a scrape of Marmite, that is the love-it-or-hate-it line doing its job.
Does John Cena like Marmite?
No. On tasting it, Cena landed firmly in the hate camp, and he reached for the brand’s own logic to justify himself: the advert says you either love it or hate it, so he was, in his words, entitled to hate it, and could officially do so. It is a very Cena response, half good sport and half genuine recoil, and it makes him one of the more quotable haters on the list precisely because he used the slogan against the spread.
Who is John Cena?
John Felix Anthony Cena was born on 23 April 1977 in West Newbury, Massachusetts. He grew up in New England and went to Springfield College, where he studied exercise physiology and was an All-American college American football player. That background in size and discipline set up the career that made him famous, long before any film camera pointed at him.
John Cena the wrestler
Cena signed with WWE in 2001 and became the company’s biggest star for most of a decade and beyond. He held the WWE Championship a record number of times and is, by most counts, the most decorated wrestler in the company’s history, with seventeen world titles. He retired from full-time wrestling in 2025. Off-screen he is also the most prolific grantor of Make-A-Wish wishes of any single person, which is the part of his story people tend to forget when they only know him as a meme.
John Cena the actor
From the mid-2000s Cena moved into acting and turned out to be genuinely good at comedy, which not every action star manages. He won praise in “Trainwreck”, “Blockers” and “The Suicide Squad”, appeared in “Bumblebee” and the “Fast and Furious” films, led the superhero series “Peacemaker”, and stole scenes as one of the many Kens in “Barbie”. The deadpan that works so well for him on screen is the same one he turned on that spoonful of Marmite.
John Cena’s notable films and TV at a glance
- Trainwreck (2015)
- Bumblebee (2018)
- Blockers (2018)
- F9 (2021)
- The Suicide Squad (2021)
- Peacemaker (2022 onwards)
- Barbie (2023)
He is an American who came to Marmite as an outsider and bounced straight off it, which is its own kind of tribute. You do not get a reaction that strong from a food nobody cares about.
