Stuber star Dave Bautista talks typecasting, Dune and why making Avengers: Endgame was so weird
Thanks to stars such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura and John Cena, the path from professional wrestling to the acting world is a well-worn one, but Dave Bautista says it did him no favours.
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Former six-time wrestling world champion Dave Bautista made the switch from wrestling to Hollywood nearly a decade ago, but he says the sport initially held him back.
Despite the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura and John Cena treading a well-worn path from professional wrestling to the acting world, Bautista says it did him no favours.
“It was actually a hindrance,” says Bautista over the phone from Budapest, where he is filming acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated big-screen adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel, Dune.
“It kept me from getting auditions. I think people labelled me before I walked in the room. I think the types of performance are so extremely different so you had to prepare for that. I think wrestling definitely brought me out of my shell a little bit, but as far as performance it couldn’t be more different. There is a stigma and a stereotype that I got from professional wrestling that was really hard to get people to see past.”
Bautista says he had to work hard and hustle his way into auditions to avoid being type cast and said no to a lot of what he calls “generic roles that people normally want to cast professional wrestlers in”.
“I just tried really hard to avoid that,” he says.
“I took a long route to a career that just in the last couple of years is starting to pay off. But it’s hard getting people to see past the muscles.”
His early roles in forgettable action fare such as The Man With the Iron Fists and The Scorpion King 3: Battle For Redemption probably did him no favours — nor his role as a burly henchman in the most recent Bond film, Spectre.
But it was his hilariously imposing, purple-skinned Drax the Destroyer in 2014’s Guardians Of the Galaxy and its 2017 sequel that started to turn things around for him.
A small but key role against type in Villeneuve’s revered Blade Runner: 2049 followed in 2017, as well as starring opposite Jodie Foster in last year’s Hotel Artemis, a part that was little seen but of which he remains immensely proud.
And now the imposing actor is looking to broaden his horizons even further with a couple of comedies in the next few months.
His buddy-cop movie inspired Stuber, with Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani opens next week, and the espionage comedy My Spy with Kristen Schaal will follow in September. Bautista admits that even after playing Drax in two Guardians films and two Avengers films, finding his funny side put him out of his comfort zone, but he was well and truly up for the challenge.
“It’s different,” he says. “And more different than you might imagine. Or maybe that was just for me because it was completely new and also because I had never really set out to do comedies or saw myself as a comedic actor, so I wasn’t completely comfortable. But it was something I really wanted to try out for myself and I really wanted to have a very well rounded career.”
For Stuber, in which he plays a grizzled, sight-impaired cop who commandeers Nanjiani’s Uber to chase drug dealers around LA, he was attracted by a script that made him laugh out loud as well as the chance to work with the comedian, with whom he had friends in common. The two, who are on screen together for almost the whole movie, hit it off immediately and spent time together before filming to hang out and go over the script, which was inspired by genre classics such as 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon.
“What really sold me was our chemistry lead because we kind of clicked right off the bat,” he says.
“I think we just got each other. We’re really different but we are also in a lot of ways really the same so we just had an immediate connection. Oddly enough, I had seen him in comedic roles and appreciated him but it was The Big Sick that made me a huge fan.”
As befits the action-comedy genre, Bautista’s character Vic gets into all manner of body-bruising scrapes, particularly with Indonesian martial arts great Iko Uwais, who plays a ruthless drug dealer.
Bautista says that again, his wrestling background didn’t hold him in particularly good stead for the spectacularly choreographed fight scenes in Stuber.
“I really rely on my stunt double a lot because sometimes I am guilty of doing things that are too big, from my professional wrestling background, or doing things that are too small from my actual, practical fighting background so a lot of the time I need his opinion and his eye to drag me towards it,” he says.
Bautista says he’s looking forward to getting back to the “family atmosphere” of the third Guardians Of the Galaxy movie, particularly after vocally defending director James Gunn, who was fired — then rehired — by Disney after some off-colour tweets from more than a decade ago came to light.
Like many of his stellar cast mates, he found filming the all-conquering Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame films to be a very strange and disconnecting experience.
“It was odd coming in a few days at a time and you never really got a chance to connect to the project,” he admits.
“And it was confusing because we were shooting out of sequence and I wasn’t sure what fit where. I was kept in the dark a lot so I never really had a full image in my head of what this project was. I didn’t even know if I was going to be in Endgame.”
But his casting in Dune, alongside luminaries such as Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem, Zendaya, Timothee Chalet, Josh Brolin and Stellan Skarsgaard, feels like a vindication of everything he has been working towards in the acting world for more than a decade.
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“That would be a great way to put it — and possibly an understatement,” he says.
“It was an emotional moment because that’s what I worked for. That’s the kind of call I worked for in this industry.
“I feel like it’s a level of respect when someone of that calibre is calling you personally to invite you on to a cast and he was very complimentary of my role in Blade Runner, which I had to fight really hard to get.
“So I felt if I could win over someone of the status of Denis Villeneuve then that’s a statement of what I set out to do.”
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