Growing up in an impoverished corner of Washington, D.C. during the 1970s, Dave Bautista didn’t see a lot of hope in his environment. His family didn’t have much, and they were completely surrounded by the specter of crime and violence in their neighborhood. But they had a television, and for young Dave, that was enough to fuel his dreams.
“I was an odd little kid who just loved movies,” Bautista recalls. “I needed something to inspire me when I was a child. I would look around at my circumstances and my living conditions, and there was nothing there. But I could watch TV or watch a movie and it would make me feel a certain way… it was incredible.”
As he spent hours watching average schmos like Luke Skywalker and Rocky Balboa rise up to become heroes on the small screen, it filled Bautista with ambition, giving him the drive to never stop chasing the dreams he had in his head. It wasn’t that he caught the acting bug; that wouldn’t come until later. Instead, the films he watched embedded a deep love of storytelling within his mind.
To the untrained eye, professional wrestling appears to be a primarily physical endeavor. Sure, the combatants pick up a
