DAVE BAUTISTA UNLEASHED
IN MAY 2002, the head of talent at World Wrestling Entertainment called Dave Bautista and told him to buy a nice suit. He was going to be on SmackDown.
Bautista, then 33, had been ascending within Ohio Valley Wrestling for the past two years, and he was thrilled about his TV debut—recently WWE had “called up” Brock Lesnar, and now Lesnar was a star. Bautista spent $500 on a suit, which was a lot of money for him then, and had it tailored. When he arrived in his new suit, he was quickly processed. Someone cut the sleeves off the suit. Someone else handed him a metal box with a large novelty chain attached. He’d assumed he would debut as a star, as Lesnar had, but instead he would play Deacon Batista, the menacing bodyguard of Reverend D-Von.
Bautista felt ridiculous as Deacon Batista, carrying around a cashbox in a mutilated suit. His body was his identity, and he felt the character had robbed him of that. In Batista Unleashed, his 2007 memoir, he ascribed significant intent to the casting: “They wanted to force me to learn how to work. They were doing it by taking away what I’d always relied on, my body, and forcing me to learn how to work the crowd with other tools.” Maybe there was a lesson, and maybe that was it. Maybe the lesson was just that wrestling owns you.
When his character later feuded with D-Von and he began wrestling as Batista—he believes WWE was unable to trademark his actual surname, so it simply dropped the u and trademarked that—Bautista’s body made him a champion. But now, at 52, he doesn’t want a career built around his body anymore.
In his early days as a wrestler, Bautista often felt like he was on the cusp of something grand. Sometimes, as in the case of his SmackDown debut, he was disappointed. But when we meet by Zoom in September, he is trending toward yet another crescendo in his second—or is that third? or fourth?—act.
Despite being a latecomer to Hollywood, Bautista found when he was in his mid-40s. Now he’s scored role, as the villainous unit Glossu “Beast” Rabban in the elegant sci-fi epic (out October 22), with guy, director Denis Villeneuve, and he should play an even larger role in the film’s forecasted second installment. is big— is “Dave Bautista’s arm” big. For Bautista, who tells me, “It wasn’t until my 40s when I really started to be okay with myself,” his progress from bouncer to wrestler to action star to serious fuckin’ actor is hugely validating. And for those of us who may sometimes feel underactualized and appalled by the rate at which we are careening toward senescence, Bautista’s self-reinvention in his 50s is thrilling.
