Knock at the Cabin star Dave Bautista on self-doubt, Bond and his traumatising Guardians farewell
WWE star turned actor Dave Bautista reveals his toughest role yet, and confesses his biggest challenge in making it in Hollywood.
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Dave Bautista says he’s lost plenty of roles because of his brawling background and the way he looks.
At close to 2m tall and weighing in at more than 120kg, there’s certainly no missing the hulking former wrestler who won the World Heavyweight Championship four times and the WWE championship twice between 2002 and 2010.
But once he’d decided to make the switch to acting – and embraced the advice of fellow wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin not to take any old crappy action film just for the pay check – he found it hard just to get in the room for roles that didn’t rely solely on his physique and fighting chops.
After a few TV roles, it was his hilarious grey-skinned Drax the Destroyer in the 2014 Marvel hit Guardians of the Galaxy that put him on the map and ever since he’s been steadily proving his ability and versatility. Alongside his return outings as Drax, there was his taciturn Bond henchman Mr Hinx in Spectre; an understated but memorable brief appearance as an android in Blade Runner: 2049; the buddy comedy Stuber, with Kumail Nanjiani; Zack Snyder’s zombie action hit Army of the Dead; and even a family spy comedy, My Spy, which saw him bossed around by a 9-year-old.
All along, he’s been very clear that he wants to be “an actor and not a movie star”, and is determined to prove to himself and others that he can as be good at his chosen profession as he was at his previous one.
“I always wanted to kind of separate myself from the pack, and for people not to see me as a wrestler turned actor,” Bautista confirms. “And for people to actually see that I really respect and love this craft, and I would like to think that people respect me in turn. I not only want to test myself, I want to challenge myself because I’m very passionate about this.
“But,” he adds with a laugh, “I also want to prove people wrong, because I’m spiteful.”
On the back of his acclaimed turn as a meathead influencer in the recent Netflix hit Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and ahead of his most challenging role yet in M. Night Shyamalan’s new psychological thriller A Knock At the Cabin, he thinks he might be finally achieving that goal, despite his sometimes crippling self-doubt and “severe anxiety” about how he is perceived.
“There’s a part of me that does,” he says. “This role – and I hope that people really receive it well – but I think if nothing else, this validates the statement that I’ve been saying all along is that I just want to be a respected actor.
“Whether people love me or hate me in this role, at least they can’t call bullshit on this. I made a statement and I backed it up by not taking an easy role that would be not challenging for me and not taking a role that people would expect me in.”
Shyamalan, who had been impressed by Bautista’s work in Blade Runner: 2049, thought that not only could he give the actor a dramatic challenge greater than he had ever been given, but he could also use his size and tattooed menace in a fresh and unexpected way.
In Knock at the Cabin, based on the 2018 novel, The Cabin At the End of the World, Bautista plays Leonard, one of four strangers who turn up unannounced to a remote holiday house, occupied by a gay couple and their adopted daughter, and tell them that one of them must be sacrificed to avert the apocalypse.
Despite Bautista already being much bigger than his co-stars, Shyamalan asked him to bulk up even more to further illustrate the contrast between the acts of terrifying violence that Leonard and his companions are demanding and his innately gentle manner.
“The contradiction between him appearing to be the most menacing person you’d ever want to meet, and him being the most gentle person that you ever would meet, makes for a good character for me, because I don’t often get offered roles to play characters that are just kind of layered in emotion,” Bautista says.
“Give me the opportunity to play a tortured soul and I’m all over it because these are the type of roles that don’t often come my way, and to have it come my way in such a huge magnitude, it’s just something that’s a once in a career for me. I’ve never been offered a role like this before and I don’t know if I will be ever again.”
Bautista’s job as Leonard was made all the more challenging by the fact that, just days before he started, he was playing Drax for the last time, with all the pyrotechnics, action and green screen effects that come with a superhero blockbuster.
The third Guardians film finished filming in Los Angeles on a Friday and he started work on Knock At the Cabin the following Monday in Philadelphia, and the rushed farewell to a character he’d played for nearly a decade and to director James Gunn, who had taken a gamble on him, made for “a bittersweet moment”.
Bautista says he hasn’t had the chance to properly process his feelings about his 10 years with his Guardians cast mates and their journey from being an unknown quantity to one of the jewels in the crown of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but says he’s looking forward to seeing them all again when the movie releases in May.
“It was a little heartbreaking,” Bautista says of the rushed goodbye. “It was a little traumatising because I still have memories of leaving that set, and it was also James Gunn’s last day on that film and he was very emotional. I would have liked the opportunity to be emotional with him because I love him so much. But I just didn’t have that luxury to sit there and hold him, and tell him how grateful I was for him and everything he did for me. He knows, I’ve told him over the years, but this was our last time being on one of these films together, and I just never had the opportunity to really embrace that moment.”
Another marker of just how far he had progressed came for Bautista on the Greek set of Glass Onion, the second of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery films starring Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc.
The last time the two had appeared together on screen was as adversaries, with Craig showing the strain of the immense pressure of leading the James Bond franchise and Bautista as his nearly wordless foe. Both actors – Craig also busted Bautista’s nose in a fight scene accident – later spoke of how difficult the shoot was, so for them to reunite more as peers on the picturesque island of Spetses was a joy for both parties.
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“I looked over at him one day and I was like, ‘Isn’t it great to be on a film together where we’re not beating the shit out of each other?’,” recalls Bautista. “And he just started laughing and that kind of summed up the whole experience. It was nothing but fun and good times. And I think he did look at me a little differently in that film. Overall, it was just so much more fun than we had on James Bond. But he’s on a pedestal with me and I don’t know if I’ll ever look at him as an equal because he is like a god to me. When I watched his level of performance, he’s just at a different level.”
Knock At the Cabin is in cinemas on Thursday
Originally published as Knock at the Cabin star Dave Bautista on self-doubt, Bond and his traumatising Guardians farewell
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