The Miz Says That He Originally Didn't Want to Impersonate John Cena & Nikki Bella

WWE Monday Night Raw Superstar The Miz recently spoke to Sports Illustrated's "Extra Mustard" about the program that he and his wife Maryse had with John Cena and Nikki Bella leading up to WrestleMania 33. Miz says that he was originally hesitant about the idea of doing the impersonations of Cena and Nikki:

“I didn’t want to do it at first, I just didn’t know if it would be good. When I go out there, I set out to do something memorable. Something great. And when I first heard the pitch of ‘Hey, do you want to imitate them?,’ I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’ll be great. I don’t know if it’ll be good.’ I kinda turned it down. Then I was driving with my wife and I was thinking about it and i was like, ‘Maybe this could be good,’ and I started doing how I would do John Cena and I just escalated it and Maryse just started dying laughing. If Maryse laughs at something, then it’s funny because she doesn’t laugh at anything. So I was like, ‘Hmm, this is something. And then I started thinking of ideas on what it would be and I was like, ‘alright we got something here.’”

It became fun. When my wife started doing Nikki, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna be really good.’ A lot of the stuff we were doing wasn’t even written. We were just going off the cuff. And the way the editors did it, with the music, how it was shot, how it was filmed, everything clicked and it all worked out. When people first heard the match was John Cena and Nikki Bella vs. The Miz and Maryse, people couldn’t stand it. They were like, ‘John Cena should be going up against The Undertaker. The Miz should be going against A.J. Styles.’ Everyone was upset, but then cut to three weeks later and everyone’s talking about this match. Cut to WrestleMania, it’s one of the matches everyone’s looking forward to seeing. [Cena’s] proposal made it huge. If you look at the whole story, that was the perfect ending. And that’s what we do. We tell stories.”