“What a horrible actor I was”: The movie that embarrassed Dave Bautista
You may well be feeling, given what’s going on in the world at the moment, that it might be pleasant to just sit back on the sofa, turn off your cerebral cortex (located within the frontal lobes in case you’re not sure) and enjoy a couple of massive lads blowing things up for a couple of hours. And if that’s the case, then here’s Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa right on cue.
The pair of man-mountains are currently getting better-than-average reviews for their straight to streaming buddy action comedy The Wrecking Crew on Prime Video and it’s a fine example of movie stars sticking to what they’re good at; much as both actors have shown over the years that they have plenty of strings to their bows, it’s more fun to see them using those bows to catapult bad guys through enormous windows.
And Bautista, to his credit, knows this all too well, keeping his bread buttered by making a succession of explosion-heavy blockbusters since 2010 while illustrating in movies like Knock at the Cabin, M Night Shyamalan’s twisty horror in 2023, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery that he is much more talented as an actor than people might give him credit for.
That hasn’t always been the case, though, or certainly not in Bautista’s mind, as his early days on the big screen after almost a decade spent as a WWE wrestler proved how much of a challenge switching careers was going to be. He told Muscle and Fitness: “I did some work on a film for a friend, and I realized what a horrible actor I was. I was so embarrassed, but it made me want to do it again and do it better.”
That film was Wrong Side of Town, a direct-to-DVD action flick that saw Bautista as a former Navy SEAL who gets dragged into a deadly conflict with some Louisiana nightclub owners, and it’s fair to say that reviews were… not good. Bautista was so upset with the result that he immediately hired an acting coach and learned his craft over the next couple of years, eventually landing a part that would prove transformational, as Drax the Destroyer in Marvel’s massive 2014 hit Guardians of the Galaxy.
Surprisingly, it was Britain’s most famous bard that inspired Bautista’s change in fortune and acting capabilities, as he explained: “My coach said, ‘If you can do Shakespeare, you can do anything,’ so we read scenes from Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew. Stage acting in itself terrifies me, and Shakespeare’s dialogue is so tricky. To me, doing it onstage would be the ultimate challenge.”
While he hasn’t been seen clutching a skull (at least not on stage) and getting upset about Yorick as yet, he has turned those lines of prose into a career as one of Hollywood’s leading muscle-bound action heroes, appearing in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, both parts of Denis Villeneuve’s billion-dollar grossing Dune and Blade Runner 2049 from the same director.
He’ll continue to keep the big money franchises coming over the next couple of years too, with Road House 2 on the way alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, plus the mega-money Highlander reboot with an all-star cast including Henry Cavill, Russell Crowe and Jeremy Irons.
