From headlining episodes of WWE Smackdown to working with a string of reputed Hollywood filmmakers, Dave Bautista has taken a different path than many of his wrestler-turned-actor peers. He has always been a person driven by pure passion more than anything else, and it was this quality that led him to become one of the biggest stars in WWE. Upon transitioning to acting, he discovered a similar passion for acting. Bautista had decided early on that he didn’t want to be the next Rock. He desired, first and foremost, to be a respected actor.
This reputation has been a long one in the making, starting with passing roles in movies like The Man with the Iron Fists to his breakthrough role as Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy. He has now worked with some of the most reputed filmmakers in the industry including Rian Johnson, Zack Snyder, and Denis Villeneuve. And as he prepares to bid farewell to Drax with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, audiences are taking note, excited about what the actor has to offer to the world next.
Getting to this point, his growth as an actor can be noted in his recent performances. Here are 7 performances by Dave Bautista that prove that he has dramatic chops.
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7 Blade Runner 2049
Although his role in Guardians of the Galaxy brought him mainstream attention, Bautista was still considered little more than an affable hunk. This perception began to shift in 2017, when he appeared in a minor role in the Denis Villeneuve movie Blade Runner 2049 and its prequel short 2048: Nowhere to Run. All told, his screen time in the two titles amounted to just around 10 minutes, where he appeared as an aging replicant in hiding.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
His performance in the movie was an eye-opener for audiences — while the performance included some action bits, the role was deeply nuanced. It set a jarring contrast with Bautista’s prior roles, and especially with the common perception about his acting range. His role in the movie was essentially that of a traumatized veteran seeking peace. Bautista executed the nuance with clarity, appearing emotionally wounded and even communicating a sense of shame about his past, all through his mannerisms and delivery.
6 Army of the Dead
Netflix
Army of the Dead was the kind of movie that perfectly suited someone with Bautista’s background and aspirations. A run-of-the-mill zombie action film at first glance, the movie was bound with a strong emotional narrative. Bautista was offered the lead role for the movie as hardened mercenary Scott Ward — an offer which he was initially inclined to refuse. But after going through the script, he discovered that it had a lot of layers going through it. The movie also gave him the chance to work with the acclaimed filmmaker Zack Snyder, and earned him some well-deserved praise from critics.
5 Room 104
HBO
Bautista had an appearance on an episode of the anthology series, Room 104 as the lead character. The series has an experimental style and the individual episodes touch upon different genres including horror, thriller, and comedy. Appearing in the Season 4 episode titled “Avalanche,” Bautista took the role of a former professional wrestler who seeks to recall repressed memories from his traumatic childhood during a therapy session. Like many other stories featured in the series, the episode is something of a mindbender, and Bautista’s character finds himself at the center of a fractured sense of reality, where nothing is as it seems.
4 Dune
Warner Bros. Pictures
Bautista got the opportunity to collaborate with Villeneuve once again in the much-anticipated fantasy epic, Dune. The movie was a valuable stepping stone for Bautista, as he found himself in a completely different tier of filmmaking, surrounded by some amazing acting talents of Hollywood. Working on the movie also meant that his name was associated with a movie that won six Academy Awards. He played the role of Count Glossu Rabban, a key antagonist who is known for his cruel and mercurial nature.
3 Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Hollywood’s acknowledgement of Bautista’s dramatic capabilities has been a gradual and incremental one — it is possible to map out his roles getting more and more sizable with time. Glass Onion carries significance in this imaginative graph. It was an A-grade Hollywood title, a classic mystery thriller where most of the characters would receive equal footing.
Bautista managed to score a role that perfectly wrote in his bulky, tattooed frame as part of the movie’s twisted bourgeois setting. He played the role of Duke Cody, an influencer who built his base on men’s rights activism and posed a hypermasculine persona. Working in the movie gave him a powerful ally — director Rian Johnson found himself extremely impressed with his acting chops, and went on to gush over his untapped potential to become a truly respected actor.
2 Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
Universal Studios
As an entry in the celebrated Ip Man film series, Master Z: Ip Man Legacy maintains some style conventions from its predecessors. Bautista signed up to the movie to fulfill a major role: the hulking, western chief antagonist who relies on a brutish fighting style to defeat his foes. At first glance, this might appear as a reversion on Bautista’s part, as it looks like a one-dimensional antagonist role that only seeks to exploit his experience in the WWE. However, he has put genuine effort to add depth to his performance, and it clearly shows in the movie.
1 Knock at the Cabin
Universal Pictures
Even before its release, Knock at the Cabin was teased as the biggest and most colorful feather in Bautista’s hat as a dramatic actor. The movie is directed by another famed auteur, M. Night Shyamalan, and has a unique proposition: a family on a vacation to a cabin is kidnapped and trapped in by a group of strangers, who make an unimaginable demand — the family has to willingly sacrifice one of their own in order to stop a divine apocalypse. Bautista is playing the leader of the kidnappers in the movie, but his role is far from a regular antagonist.
There is legitimate excitement among audiences about Bautista’s performance in the movie. It helps that Shyamalan himself believes that the performance is one of the best of the year. Meanwhile, he has shared with GQ that the movie has the most amount of dialogue he has ever gotten in a role, with pages of monologues.
