SINGAPORE—Because he stands a muscular 6’6” and weighs almost 300 lbs, Dave Bautista scares a lot of people. He is, after all, best known as the professional wrestler Dave “The Animal” Batista (that’s right, no “u”), an intimidating opponent in the squared circle. But it turns out that his biggest enemy was himself.
See, despite a cameo in this year’s “Wrestlemania,” the 45-year-old Bautista (yes, the “u” is back) has quit wrestling. He’s now a professional actor, and that’s the way he wants it.
As Drax in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” he plays a deadly fighter seeking revenge for the death of his family. “This role needs a lot of emotional range. This is the role that shows I take acting seriously. I don’t want to just be the action guy. Drax is literally an emotional roller coaster. He’s all over the place.”
Bautista is not really what he seems. The son of a Greek mother and a Filipino-American father (he has a tattoo of the Greek and Philippine flags), David Michael Bautista Jr. gained fame in the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), becoming a six-time world champ. Ironically, it was when he was working on a WWE movie project—the 2010 direct-to-DVD “Wrong Side of Town”—that the acting bug bit him hard.
Huge leap
It was when the first scene was being shot that he “realized I was really bad at this. I think that I fall in love with things that are really challenging for some reason. It gives me something to aim for. Most people think that because I’ve been in front on the camera for years, it would be easy …”
Bautista took a huge leap in 2010 when he left the WWE to become an actor full-time.
He says he left the WWE on good terms, but adds that he also quit because “they didn’t believe in me. When I left, they stopped supporting me in everything that I did. At my age, to leave behind my bread and butter was not an easy thing to do. I literally sacrificed everything I had earned from the WWE.”
He says he’s not dismissing wrestling at all: “The WWE universe is huge, but when you start stepping into mainstream films like Marvel’s, it’s much bigger. It was a struggle for me breaking into Hollywood because I was walking into offices where nobody knew who I was,” he tells Inquirer Super. They had this perception, hearing that I was a professional wrestler, they thought I was going to be something that I wasn’t. I think a lot of people expected me to walk through the door yelling, all big and macho, when that’s not who I really am.”
In tears
Getting the role of Drax was so important for him, especially after finding out he was director James Gunn’s only choice. When he received the call confirming he got the part, Bautista broke down in tears and drove aimlessly in a daze: “The reason it meant so much to me is because of what I gave up and what I sacrificed … I wanted to do this so badly.”
Yet he looked forward to this role for unexpected reasons: “People ask me this a lot. ‘Do you want to be the next Rock?’ I say I would rather be the next Mickey Rourke. I’ve worked hard and I’ve even dieted to lose weight so I won’t get typecast. I really wanted to be a serious actor. And I realized that because of the way I look I will always be somewhat kept to certain roles. But I want to stretch and challenge myself.”
Look at him again as he wears glasses. There is a stillness that belies his size. “It’s weird when people walk up to me and they know who I am. Inside, I feel like a normal guy and an introvert,” he says. His Zen-like presence aided him immensely in his role as Drax, because Bautista had to literally stand still for four hours every day for his makeup.
His movie choices are unusual as well. “We can talk about ‘The Godfather’ and we can talk about ‘Napoleon Dynamite.’ I love both films for different reasons. I just like good, interesting movies,” he says.
That carries over to the films he wants to do. “When I got the role of Drax a lot of comic geeks were not happy,” he points out. “They wanted a real, serious, established actor so I want them to be happy. I want them to say, ‘we were wrong, Dave is the right guy for the part.’”
He has a feeling he will be revisiting Drax. “When we wrapped, nobody said anything about a sequel but I think we all just felt like we were going to be doing this again sometime.”
Smart and sensitive, Dave Bautista is not what he seems at all. Instead of Drax’s hunt for vengeance, he is after something else: Redemption in the affirmation that he is what he believes himself to be.
Distributed by Disney, Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” opens on July 31.
