Season two of Peacemaker will finally have Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo) coming in hot for Chris Smith (John Cena) to exact revenge over the death of his son. Killing his squad leader, Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad was a moment that made Peacemaker irredeemable before being hilariously unpacked in season one of the HBO Max show, which centered the antihero’s mistake as something that broke him—that and the bullet Bloodsport (Idris Elba) put through his neck.
In an interview with GQ, Peacemaker star John Cena discussed how Smith viewed his action in the moment: “To know that Peacemaker is willing to kill for peace is important because he does. And he kills a person who he looks up to and who he’s developed a friendship with. What we know about Chris Smith through the film is he doesn’t have many friends. And when he falls in with this ragtag group of people, there’s a scene at the cantina where everyone is having drinks and sharing and getting along, and like, you can see him leaning into having friends for the first time.”
Cena continued, “We don’t know any of the backstory from season one. We don’t know about how he’s brought up. We don’t know about his brother. We don’t know any of that stuff.” This is backstory viewers become privy to when they see multitudes in Chris he’s not even aware of on Peacemaker, but the killing in Suicide Squad makes it hard to overcome based on what’s given.
“You can give a note about [how] this guy’s kind of a social outcast, and that can stick. He’s found somebody in lockstep like Rick Flag, where he admires this person. It’s everything he wants to be. And then when Flag gets a different perspective on what truth is and what virtue is, Peacemaker does what he usually does. And that’s just kill for peace. And this is the first time you probably see that armor wear thin.” Deserving any sort of redemption is the last thing on anyone’s mind when he kills Flag.
In season one of Peacemaker, we begin to see that he might be deserving of forgiveness despite the red on his ledger, because Flag’s final words to him resonate: “Peacemaker…what a joke.”
The trauma of the mistake sets in motion the identity crisis at the core of the show when you see he’s afraid to kill. Cena described the moment when Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji) calls him out over it as “Peacemaker’s first chance to kind of get back on the horse after the Rick Flag trauma, and you can see he’s not over it.”
He’s seen by the 11th Street kids as vulnerable: “This hard-nosed killer who talks amongst his peers like the biggest badass when he’s hit with the moment of truth to do things that he wouldn’t even think twice about. He starts to question if what he’s doing is right.”
Eventually Peacemaker had a breakthrough by killing his bigoted fascist father, but now, of course, in season two, another dad is on the way to get even. He continued to describe how Chris’ evolution might change a well-deserved amount of payback when Flag Sr. shows up: “[You] want to root for the flawed character, and I think that’s what’s important about all the characters in Peacemaker. They all have their setbacks and flaws, but you all want to root for them because they’re all trying to do better.”
Watch the full GQ interview below:
Peacemaker season one is now streaming on HBO Max; season two premieres August 21.
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