All or Nothing
Bautista considers his next move at home in Tampa, Florida.
photographer JIMMY RUGGIERO
makeup + hair STEPHANIE LOCKWOOD
You will never be a professional wrestler. You suck. Get lost.
Dave Bautista doesn’t remember the exact words he heard from the talent scout who ran the World Champion Wrestling camp where Bautista first decided to try out to become a pro wrestler. But he can remember his anger at being locked out.
“Having someone tell me I’ll never make it… It broke me for maybe two days. Then it pissed me off,” Bautista says. “I wanted to succeed out of spite.”
He also wanted to succeed because it was this or nothing.
Today, Dave Bautista is a world-famous movie star. Widely considered one of the best wrestlers-turned-actors of the modern era, his performances in films such as Glass Onion, Knock at the Cabin, Dune, Blade Runner 2049, and the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy have received significant acclaim. Bautista’s CV reads like a who’s who of Hollywood’s biggest names, from working with superhero auteurs like James Gunn and Zack Snyder to prestige filmmakers like Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.
But there was a time not so long ago when Bautista seemed to be going nowhere in life. “I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have an education. I didn’t have a future,” he says.
In the upcoming Wrecking Crew, Bautista plays a straight-laced Navy SEAL — a far cry from the tumultuous childhood Bautista experienced growing up.
After dropping out of high school at 17, Bautista spent his days lifting weights at the gym. At night, he worked as a bouncer at nightclubs around Washington D.C., where he grew up. Having a job meant stability. As a kid, Bautista’s family struggled with poverty. He stole pencils from a Navy Yard recruiting office near his elementary school because his parents couldn’t afford to buy them.
They lived in a rough neighborhood. Bautista recalls playing with friends one night knowing there was a dead body near his house. “We weren’t fazed by it at all. Everyone was outside their homes talking to police about the guy dead in the alley,” says Bautista. “We were kids just happy to be outside having fun.”
What scared a young Bautista wasn’t hearing police sirens or seeing the occasional corpse; it was social anxiety. In school, Bautista had undiagnosed dyslexia and was often the student hiding at the back of the room, mortified by the prospect of being called to read out loud in front of the class. His two friends were the only other two Filipinos attending Wakefield High School in Virginia. Both of them were wrestlers and they convinced the naturally athletic Bautista to join the wrestling team. He learned to love the sport but always saw himself as a performer despite being shy.
“I remember watching the theater kids at lunchtime. They all had big personalities and were outgoing,” Bautista says. “I was always introverted but I wanted to be like those kids, performing and being fearless.”
Despite his shyness as a young man, Bautista always envisioned himself as a performer.
Bautista’s performance anxiety followed him to wrestler Afa Anoa‘i’s Wild Samoan Training Center in Pennsylvania (where Bautista enrolled for classes after getting rejected from the wrestling camp) and even after he got signed to WWE on a developmental contract in 2000.
“I was confident physically except anytime I had to speak to the crowd, it was traumatizing,” he says. “Eventually I became more afraid of blowing this opportunity than anything else. I finally got my foot in the door. I knew I was never getting another shot if I messed this up.”
It took years for Bautista — or Batista, as he was known in the ring — to embrace the showmanship side of pro wrestling. The fans embraced him too; Bautista would go on to win six world championship titles and became the de facto face of SmackDown by 2009. In fact, acting didn’t interest him at all when friend and fellow wrestler Rob Van Dam asked Bautista to appear in Wrong Side of Town, a direct-to-video action flick. At this point, he had performed in front of cameras for years. Bautista figured, how hard could a movie be?
“I thought acting would be easy. When I saw the film, I realized how bad I was at it.” Bautista decided to step away from wrestling to become a better actor, if only to prove to himself that he could. Although many (including his now former bosses at WWE) weren’t convinced he had the chops, others lent their support.
“I got good advice from Stone Cold Steve Austin who told me I was going to get offered garbage, straight-to-DVD movies. He said, ‘people want to take your face, put it on a box, and sell it. Don’t do it or you’re going to get stuck in a rut.’ I really took that to heart,” says Bautista.
Another advocate was Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA, who fought to cast Bautista in his martial arts film, The Man with the Iron Fists, despite initial resistance from studio execs. One job led to another: Iron Fists helped establish Bautista’s relationship with Universal Studios, which later led to his role in Vin Diesel’s Riddick.
When Bautista auditioned for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, director James Gunn immediately wanted him for the role of Drax the Destroyer. Disney wasn’t so sure. Bautista auditioned again and again for months and underwent screen tests, makeup tests, and chemistry tests with lead actor Chris Pratt to make sure the two actors were compatible on screen. All the while hearing rumors that the studio cast somebody else.
Bautista was driving to the gym when he found out he got the part. “I pulled over and broke down crying,” he says. “I turned the car around and drove home to tell my wife the news, we couldn’t believe it.” As the literal-minded and unintentionally humorous Drax (“Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.”), Bautista emerged as a breakout character in Guardians of Galaxy and its sequels as well as a major box office draw.
Bautista continues to forge his own way to success.
After 2014’s Guardians, Bautista’s career took off. He found himself pummeling Daniel Craig’s James Bond in Spectre the following year and protecting a secret miracle from Ryan Gosling in 2017’s Blade Runner 2049. In 2018, Bautista was equal parts mercy and menace as a bouncer with bedside manner in Drew Pearce’s dark futuristic Hotel Artemis — then he was trading jokes (“It’s a baby gun. It allows you to fire it while crying.”) with Kumail Nanjiani in 2019’s buddy comedy Stuber.
“As a wrestler who became an actor, I didn’t want to be the next Rock,” Bautista says. “That’s no disrespect; I’m just a different performer taking a different route.”
So far, the 2020s have marked a turning point for Bautista, with dramatic roles as brutal enforcer Rabban Harkonnen in both of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films and the soft-spoken, apocalypse-bearing Leonard in M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin.
Earlier this year, Bautista was in Hawai‘i filming The Wrecking Crew, an upcoming action comedy starring Jason Momoa as a loose-cannon cop and Bautista as his by-the-book Navy SEAL brother. When they weren’t unraveling the mystery of their father’s murder on screen, the two were riding motorcycles, hitting the beach, and driving around O‘ahu taking in the scenery. At one point, Bautista even leaped out of a helicopter into the ocean.
“There’s something about Hawai‘i that makes you feel good,” says Bautista. “We were outside all the time and it was magical. It’s the best filming experience I’ve ever had.”
“I’m just a different performer taking a different route,” Bautista says.
Near the end of Bautista’s time in Hawai‘i, he took part in a talk story event hosted by ICAN (International Cultural Arts Network), which focuses on elevating and empowering local voices. In the audience were aspiring Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander filmmakers eager to carve their own path to success in the entertainment industry.
For Bautista, who is of Filipino and Greek descent, the discussion provided an opportunity to connect with other hapa creatives and share advice shaped by a lifetime of defying expectations and proving the doubters wrong.
“Don’t let opportunities pass you by. If you run into a wall, go around it — or blow up the wall. I’ve done this my whole career,” Bautista says.
“If you think something is right for you and it’s something you want to fight for, then fight for it.”
