When it comes to professional wrestlers making the transition to Hollywood, they tend to follow a familiar script: They get some reps in with lowbrow, low-budget action movies, and if they prove to be capable actors, the blockbusters may come calling. (The alternative of sticking with the straight-to-video pipeline isn’t too bad, either: Adam Copeland, a.k.a. WWE’s Edge, recently starred in Money Plane, a wonderful work of pure trash.) Not every wrestling alum will be Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, who repeatedly tops the list of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, but he’s laid the groundwork for what a successful pivot between the two entertainment industries looks like.
While Johnson has transcended his WWE roots to the extent that he’s flirting with an honest-to-God presidential run in the future, not every former wrestler aims to emulate his career. Just ask Dave Bautista. “I never wanted to be the next Rock,” Bautista explained to GQ. “I just want to be a good fucking actor. A respected actor.” Setting aside the fact that his comments about Johnson could be perceived as a verbal chokeslam, Bautista’s latest roles collaborating with the likes of Rian Johnson, Denis Villeneuve, and M. Night Shyamalan have underlined that he’s practicing what he preached. As a result, Bautista might be the very first of his kind: the wrestler turned character actor.
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Though Bautista initially cut his teeth on the direct-to-video scene—early highlights include a Scorpion King sequel costarring Kimbo Slice—it didn’t take long for him to seek out smaller roles in bigger projects. Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe came calling (more on that later), Bautista’s most prominent role was arguably in Riddick, the third installment in Vin Diesel’s underrated sci-fi franchise. Diesel’s Richard B. Riddick is the unquestioned star of the show, but Bautista was game to play second fiddle as Diaz, one of the many mercenaries hoping to take out the notorious outlaw for a hefty bounty. Despite Bautista’s bona fides in the ring, his character never stood a chance against Riddick—if it’s impossible for Diesel to lose a fight in a Fast & Furious movie, that sentiment certainly extends to his other franchise work.
While his character was purposefully outclassed in Riddick, the film demonstrated that Bautista could serve as an imposing physical presence: the most bankable asset for wrestlers trying to make it in Hollywood. This type of quality in an actor might seem one-dimensional, but it paved the way for Bautista to join the James Bond franchise for a small but memorable appearance in Spectre. Following in the tradition of taciturn Bond henchmen like Jaws and Oddjob, Bautista played Mr. Hinx, the top assassin in the film’s eponymous criminal organization. Naturally, Mr. Hinx’s standout moment comes in a fight scene, when he ambushes Daniel Craig’s 007 on a train and easily overpowers him with brute force. Despite Bond being a seasoned veteran of life-threatening scenarios, when he squares up with a human bulldozer while confined in a train, you feel like he’s in genuine danger. Unsurprisingly, Bond inevitably gets the upper hand, but the icing on the cake is that it leads to Mr. Hinx uttering his only line of dialogue in the entire movie: “Shit.” As far as doing more with less, Bautista put on a master class by outshining the comparatively smaller spotlight afforded to him.
On paper, the kind of raw physicality Bautista brought to Spectre seemed like the biggest draw for Villeneuve when he cast the actor in Blade Runner 2049 as Sapper Morton, a replicant tracked down by Ryan Gosling’s K at the beginning of the film. But even in his limited screen time, Morton is perhaps the closest that Villeneuve’s sequel gets to a character like Roy Batty, the weary android from the original film whose haunting aura evokes something far more human. (The tiny glasses on Bautista were a nice touch.) Blade Runner 2049 was the movie that opened new doors for him in Hollywood. More than any previous project, it proved that there was something to him as an actor beyond just his hulking frame. “That was the opportunity that I was looking for because I don’t get offered roles like that a lot,” he told Uproxx of the film in 2021. “It was hard for people to see past my physicality.”
Of course, Bautista probably wouldn’t have been on Villeneuve’s radar in the first place if it weren’t for Guardians of the Galaxy, which gave him a legitimately life-changing role as part of the MCU. Playing the warrior Drax, Bautista excels as one of Marvel’s finest (and most unexpected) sources of comic relief: a character whose calling card is taking well-known idioms and metaphors very literally. “Nothing goes over my head,” Drax says in the first Guardians after Bradley Cooper’s Rocket Raccoon explains that metaphors do, in fact, go over his head. “My reflexes are too fast, I would catch it.” Bautista’s deadpan line deliveries made Drax a fan favorite within the MCU, but after appearing in five movies and a Disney+ holiday special, the actor is ready to leave the character behind for new pastures. (If it’s any consolation for Marvel fans, we’ll get to see Drax one last time when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 arrives in May.) As for what Bautista’s post-Marvel slate will actually entail, the past few years have offered an exciting glimpse into the next stage of his career: namely, finding more opportunities to collaborate with visionary auteurs.
In addition to reuniting with Villeneuve for the director’s two-part Dune adaptation—Bautista’s Glossu Rabban doesn’t have much to do besides scowl in the first film, so expect more from him in the sequel coming later this year—the actor had his most high-profile starring role in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. As Scott Ward, the leader of a mercenary team hired to recover $200 million from a casino vault in a zombie-infested Las Vegas, Bautista imbues the character with a rugged sensitivity as he tries to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell), in the midst of all the mayhem. In a strange way, Army of the Dead proved how much Bautista had already evolved as a performer: He could’ve played a mercenary in this sort of movie at any point in his career, but his role as the emotional anchor of the story proved that filmmakers were finally looking beyond his enormous physique.
To that end, when Johnson initially conceived the character of Duke Cody in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, he was imagining someone scrawny who was overcompensating for his feelings of inadequacy by becoming a men’s rights activist. But in casting Bautista for the role, Johnson unlocked something even more compelling: an insecure figure in the body of an absolute tank. The contrast between how Cody cockily portrays himself to his followers on the internet and his subservient behavior around alpha-like tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) adds a fascinating wrinkle to the story, especially when Bautista’s character—spoiler alert—is fatally poisoned to kick Glass Onion’s murder mystery into high gear. It’s hard to stand out in a star-studded ensemble featuring the likes of Norton, Daniel Craig, Kate Hudson, and Janelle Monáe, but Bautista more than holds his own, further cementing his status as the greatest actor to ever come from a wrestling background. (Rian Johnson, for his part, wholly agrees.)
But despite all these milestones, it’s Bautista’s lead role in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, Knock at the Cabin, that might be the actor’s most significant achievement to date. An adaptation of Paul G. Tremblay’s acclaimed horror novel The Cabin at the End of the World, the movie begins with four strangers, led by Bautista’s Leonard, holding a family of three hostage as they explain that one of the family members must willingly sacrifice themselves to prevent the apocalypse. It’s a terrifying scenario, but while other home invasion movies are pretty unambiguous about the evil intentions of the intruders (see: The Strangers, Hush), what makes Knock at the Cabin so intriguing is that Leonard and Co. wholeheartedly believe that this sacrifice must be made for the greater good.
Bautista has called the role the most challenging of his career, and you can see where he’s coming from. Much of the tension in Knock at the Cabin is derived from Leonard appearing to be so gentle and empathetic in spite of the nightmarish circumstances—it’s revealed midway through the film that he has a background in education. The character is also a complete 180 from what Bautista was doing in a movie like Spectre: Leonard tries to justify his actions through plenty of dialogue with the hostages, and Shyamalan gives the actor the full movie star treatment via close-ups of his face in pivotal moments. All told, it’s the sternest test of Bautista’s acting chops, and he passes with flying colors.
Going forward, Bautista has made it clear that he’s game for anything, already lamenting that he’s never gotten an opportunity to star in a rom-com. (To the movie executives of the world: Put this dude in a rom-com, and not just because you could end up on the receiving end of a Batista Bomb.) The biggest challenge for Bautista is that former professional wrestlers were never expected to have such an expansive repertoire—even John Cena, another worthy WWE alum who’s become a successful actor, mostly excels in comedic roles. Ideally, whether he’s popping in as a scene-stealer or helming another project as a leading man, Bautista will get more roles that showcase his range. As his past few years working with celebrated auteurs have proved, Bautista belongs in a category of his own, and he won’t be relinquishing his title as the wrestler-to-actor GOAT anytime soon.
