When you see the chip that Dave Bautista carries around on his shoulder, you stop wondering how he keeps that physique at age 52.
“A lot of people have a stereotype of me. They put me in that mold of a wrestler-turned-actor. I just want people to see me in a different light,” Bautista says to Esquire Middle East, his tone tired and determined.
We’re speaking on Zoom ahead of the release of the Zack Snyder-helmed Netflix blockbuster Army of the Dead, which features the biggest role of his career thus far. As proud as he is of the film and what he was able to accomplish with one of genre cinema’s most singular filmmakers, he can’t stop looking forward.
He’s sitting in front of a green screen, wearing a tight-fitting blazer with a light grey sheen complemented by a white-faced gold watch on his wrist and a wide, flat-brimmed black hat on his head. His favourite orange-tinted sunglasses, the ones with the thick black frames, rest on his face. As immaculately put together as Dave is on the outside, he doesn’t seem at peace in his spirit.
Dave seems restless, keenly aware that he doesn’t have time to waste. If he’s going to become what he believes he can become, what matters most is not his last step, it’s his next one.
“I want to move forward with my career. And I can’t always do that if I’m just in smaller supporting roles. I hope it’ll open some eyes and open some doors,” says Bautista.
Here’s the thing about Dave Bautista that you may not know: He doesn’t just want to be a movie star. He wants to become one of the best actors of his generation.
“You know, I love my professional wrestling background. But I think a lot of people, when they leave that world of professional wrestling, they’re searching for that same spotlight somewhere else. They want that mainstream spotlight in Hollywood. They set out on a journey to be a movie star. And that was never my mission, that was never my goal, to be a movie star. I really just wanted to be an actor,” says Bautista.
“I’m capable of more than just being a big muscle head, or someone who can deliver a comedic line,” he continues.
Don’t misunderstand him though, he’s not ungrateful for what got him here. This is just the reality of living the last two decades making up for lost time.
Dave has often said his life didn’t start until he was 30. Until then, he only had two ambitions in life—‘don’t die’ and ‘don’t go to jail’. He achieved both—narrowly—growing up in a dangerous area in Washington DC where two murders happened on his front lawn before landing a job as a nightclub bouncer. It was a gig he kept until the day he had to borrow money from his boss just to pay for his kids’ Christmas presents. It was at that point he knew his limited ambitions weren’t going to cut it.
“I remember crying about it and just feeling so worthless. That was when I made a conscious decision. I’ve got to do something with myself,” Bautista says.
He saw an advertisement on TV for World Championship Wrestling. He tried out, but was told he’d never make it. He believed otherwise.
He enrolled in the Wild Samoans Training Center, pushing himself as hard as he could. WWE liked what they saw, picking him up on a cheap developmental contract. He took what he was given and made himself a star, and in a few short years worked his way up to becoming World Heavyweight Champion.
But still, he was unsatisfied. In shocking fashion, Dave quit the business in 2010, deciding to become an actor, something that some wrestlers had done with great success—namely Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson—but many more had failed at, badly.
At first, it seemed Bautista was headed towards the latter. He couldn’t book a good gig for the life of him, and, in his own words, he slowly lost everything he’d built.
That is until James Gunn cast him as Drax the Destroyer, a scene-stealing self-serious alien assassin in Marvel’s smash hit Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). From there, everything changed.
The outsized success of the film made him a star far beyond the squared circle, and he capitalized on it as best he could. He booked a role in the next James Bond movie, starred opposite Sylvester Stallone in Escape Plan 2, and seemed headed towards a career as a reliable action star. If watched closely, however, he clearly craved more.
In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, for example, Bautista played an android-in-hiding named Sapper Morton, a stoic brute that became much more in Dave’s hands. In just a short sequence, Dave the actor was able to imbue Morton with pathos and depth, a character capable of great violence who was thoughtful and gentle in nature.
By the time Guardians of the Galaxy 2 rolled around, Bautista had clearly upped his skills considerably, bringing a range of performance to a character who moved up from a scene-stealer to a show-stopper.
That’s when things started to stagnate. For the last few years, most of what he’s appeared in seemed to oscillate between the same two options—the muscle head, and the comic relief. Bautista hasn’t able to push himself as far as he wants to, and he’s desperate to find out how far he can grow.
“It’s been my mission all along to really prove myself as an actor. It’s been quite a chore searching out those roles that would afford me the opportunity to really showcase that side of my performance,” says Bautista.
“I can’t find out how good of an actor I am until I’m offered those roles that are award-winning type roles. And those roles for a person like myself are just really hard to come by.”
Bautista needed someone with vision, someone who saw something more. Bautista needed someone who believed in him.
Enter Zack Snyder.
With Army of the Dead, Snyder has stepped away from other people’s sandboxes for the time being to finally build another of his own, away from Superman, Batman, Frank Miller or Alan Moore. With his latest, he’s closer to the world of George Romero that he entered with his remake and directorial debut, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead, but this time he’s not bound by anyone else’s rules. Army of the Dead is a Zombie heist movie set in Las Vegas complete with its own zombie tiger, but it’s also something greater, a fully realized world with endless stories left to tell.
For its lead character Scott Ward, a mercenary and founder of the zombie-killing group Las Vengeance, Snyder wanted Bautista. And it wasn’t Guardians or Spectre that gave him the idea, it was the small, nuanced performance in Blade Runner.
“I love Dave. I love what he did in Blade Runner. That part he played was unbelievable. I thought the way he looked in that movie was unbelievable. I did love him in Guardians movies, I just didn’t know [what he was capable of]. Then when I saw him in Blade Runner, I was like, ‘okay, this guy can kind of do anything really in a weird way,” Snyder tells us.
The only problem was that Bautista was also offered a role in his old friend James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, filming at the same time. He would have to choose.
“I get to build a relationship with Netflix, I get a lead role in a great film — and I get paid a lot more money,” Bautista said in an interview with Digital Spy. “I had to call James, and I told him, ‘It breaks my heart, because as a friend, I want to be there with you, but professionally, this is the smart decision for me.'”
While the ‘a lot more money’ joke there might catch your eye, it’s what he said right before that mattered more. Snyder wasn’t just offering him a role in his new zombie movie. Snyder was potentially opening the door that he’d been trying to pry open with a crow bar to no avail.
“I really lucked out, because in this film, not only did I get a character who has that kind of A-to-Z emotion range, I also had a director who just gave me so much freedom to dive even deeper into it, and make Scott Ward an emotional, richer character than he was on page. It was a huge opportunity for me.”
In Bautista’s hands, Scott Ward would not just be your standard action badass lead, shooting machine guns at the undead in slow motion, blood spattering on his face. He’d still be that of course—it’s a zombie heist movie, not Sophie’s Choice—but he didn’t let things stop there.
“He’s also a loving father, someone who’s just trying to redeem himself, who’s scarred and damaged. In one particular scene in the film, within the span of like a minute to a minute and a half, I had to switch gears and change emotions like five or six time. That was a challenge for me, but such a luxury to be able to be in a film that is that complete,” says Bautista.
Snyder reveled in Bautista’s duality, knowing he needed a guy who looked believable holding a gun who could also dive into the depths of Ward’s psyche.
“If you look at Dave, if you’re with him physically in the same room, you’re like, ‘Okay, that guy is legitimately like intimidating in his size and his demeanor and everything’. But there’s a vulnerability that he has, too. I told him, ‘you know, this character kind of has this profound sadness about him, and he’s like, ‘no problem’,” adds Snyder.
Bautista was, admittedly, less interested in the zombies themselves, but Snyder quickly changed his mind.
“Zack expressed this thought about zombies which I thought was really interesting, because I’d never honestly put very much thought into zombies and what they meant, or why people are so intrigued by them. He said zombies are really people with their humanity stripped away. I thought that was a really interesting way to look at it,” he says.
Ahead of the film’s global release on Netflix, Bautista is eager for the film to become his new calling card, the one that gets people to listen.
“If I’m successful with Army of the Dead, that means I’m successful with a lead. That means more people will be willing to listen to me. That’s what I’m after. I want to leave this business feeling like I accomplished something, like I gained respect from my peers and the people that I’ve worked with. I want people to really recognize me as a guy who just came from sports entertainment but at the end of the day just really wanted to be a respected actor. That’s it.”
Even if people don’t start offering him different kinds of roles, he doesn’t plan to just sit on his hands.
“Even if I have to create those parts for myself, [I want roles that] make me a better actor and make people respect me more as an actor,” he says, adding that beyond that, “my five-year goal is to be directing somewhere in the next five years.”
Bautista has a lot on his plate. He admits that times have changed, he actually has more work than he can handle, and he has so much he wants to do that he doesn’t have time to squeeze it all in. But as tempting as it might seem, he won’t allow himself to feel satisfied.
Dave Bautista wants more, and he will do everything in his power to earn it. It’s time you start believing in him, too.
Army of the Dead will stream globally on Netflix starting May 21, 2021
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