Dave Bautista: ‘Fame is overwhelming – sometimes I want to crawl under a rock and hide’

When he became a movie star in his early forties, after years of professional wrestling in the WWE, Dave Bautista was suddenly racked with insecurity. “I was trying everything and anything to fit in,” he says. “I didn’t know if I should lose weight to stop looking the way I do, or not be who I am. Even when I was out in public, I didn’t know if I had to portray myself a certain way or dress a certain way. I was lost.”

Standing at 6ft 6 and built like a Kodiak bear, Bautista, who plays Drax the Destroyer in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, is the softest, most sensitive person who could conceivably destroy every bone in your body. His voice has a gruff if timid baritone, and is so faint that it’s sometimes indecipherable. He’s also a curious mix of anxiety and creative determination; an arty wallflower who happens to have a physique sculpted by the gods. Even today, the 51-year-old says, he finds fame a challenge.

“It can get a bit overwhelming,” Bautista explains from his home in Tampa, Florida – far away from the noise and temptations of Los Angeles or New York. “Sometimes even now I want to crawl under a rock and hide. I live a very secluded life. It’s my way of hiding under a rock, I guess.”

Hearing Bautista speak this way comes as a surprise, but it’s also something he’s used to his advantage throughout his acting career. Instead of playing brutes or heavies, Bautista has gravitated towards comedies. He played a deadpan LAPD detective in last year’s Stuber, and this week takes the lead in My Spy, an action comedy that resembles the love child of Notting Hill and Kindergarten Cop. He still doesn’t think he’s funny, though.

“I struggle a little bit with it,” he confesses, with trademark modesty. “Comedy is really uncomfortable to me, and I second-guess everything that I do. Even watching Stuber, I cringe at some of the things I did in that. But at the same time I hear people laughing – so it must be all right?”

Part of the appeal of My Spy, Bautista says, was getting the chance to play someone’s love interest. He stars as an uptight and unfriendly CIA agent assigned to monitoring a single mother (Parisa Fitz-Henley) with alleged ties to a terrorist. So far, so conventional. Seeing Bautista slowly fall for her, however, all while squabbling with her nine-year-old daughter (Chloe Coleman), is a delight. The actor is charming and physically elastic, throwing himself into elaborate dance sequences and awkward first-date banter. A long-time fan of the romantic comedy genre, Bautista says it was exciting, if unexpectedly challenging, to play someone so earthbound.

“There were times when I felt like I was learning to act all over again,” he remembers. “Just starting from scratch. A lot of times I was a bit uncomfortable, but I think it worked into the film pretty well. I’m aware that I look a certain way, and if I don’t get people to be emotionally invested in my character, they won’t want to root for me. I feel like you can only get people to be invested in you if you are vulnerable. It’s also true to who I am – I’m an emotional person, and I really wear my heart on my sleeve in everyday life.”

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Bautista’s emotional honesty is perhaps a product of how late he found fame. Before professional wrestling, Bautista was a bouncer, a lifeguard and a petty thief. Born into poverty in suburban Virginia and estranged from his father at an early age, he describes himself as being a “shy and introverted kid”. He would get into fights and occasionally trouble with the law (he was sentenced to one year of probation following an altercation with two bar patrons while working as a bouncer) but found catharsis in bodybuilding. He was 30 when he finally decided to audition for the World Wrestling Federation (which later became the WWE). Within two years of his recruitment he had become one of the brand’s most recognisable faces, often mentioned in the same breath as Triple H, Randy Orton and John Cena. It was through wrestling that he discovered the joy of performing.

Like many of WWE’s biggest names during its mid-Noughties peak, Bautista would take acting roles in between events. He followed in the footsteps of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – the first WWE superstar to become a major movie star – turning up in the direct-to-DVD sequel The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption, and appearing as villains on series such as Smallville and Chuck. He would begin to deliberately turn down parts that felt too conventional for a wrestler-turned-actor, however, holding out for roles that truly excited him. Wrestling, meanwhile, took a backseat: 2009 marked his last year of regular fights, and he would retire from it completely in 2019.

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“Things happened late for me, but in retrospect I don’t think I would have had it any other way,” he says. “I’m very content with how my life’s gone, and proud of it, actually. Sometimes I regret, and I look back and I think, ‘God, I really wish I was [famous] in my twenties,’ but at the same time – I’ve lived a full life, and I look back on it and I draw from it and it helps me in what I do now. If I hadn’t lived through that rough life, that hard life, maybe I wouldn’t be the performer that I am? I’m still growing and learning, but at least I have a life to draw from.”

Bautista’s background, and his experiences in vastly different walks of life, have also inspired his politics. Today he is one of Hollywood’s most fiercely outspoken stars, even if it’s sometimes difficult to square with a man who is also plagued with insecurity and self-doubt. He says that he’s always stood up for what he feels is right, though as a young man did so with his fists. Today, he exclusively uses his voice.

“I’m opinionated, and I’m willing to back my opinion up,” he explains. “I’m just a fighter, and I protect the people I love and the people I care about.”

In recent years, Bautista has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump and, inspired by his lesbian mother, condemned a Roman Catholic Bishop for homophobic comments in 2019. Most notably, Bautista has taken on Disney and won. When Guardians of the Galaxy mastermind James Gunn was briefly fired from the next sequel, for historic tweets that joked about paedophilia, it was Bautista who led the crusade to get him reinstated – even threatening to walk away from the franchise if Gunn didn’t return. Disney eventually changed its mind, with Gunn (and Bautista) scheduled to film Volume 3 later this year. In terms of politics, Bautista says that speaking out is his duty.

“I was never really politically outspoken until recently,” he explains. “But I feel obligated because I think things have gotten so bad. I never really wanted to influence anybody’s opinion, but now I think it’s come to the point where things have gotten so bad that you pick a side, and you voice your opinion, and hopefully people will follow suit.”

“That’s it,” he continues. “I’m just speaking my own opinion and I hope that it influences people, because I think it’s the right thing to do. I never would have done that in the past, and it’s still a little uncomfortable for me to be that way. But I think people need to pick a side and they need to be very open, as artists, outspoken about it, and about where they stand. That’s how bad it’s got. Just pick a side.”

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Finding his public voice has coincided with finding himself as an actor, he says. What has helped is the trust placed in him by filmmakers he respects. One of Bautista’s strongest roles came in 2017, when Denis Villeneuve cast him as a withdrawn and sensitive replicant in Blade Runner 2049. It was a minor if impactful cameo, yet he admits feeling uncertain on the set as to whether Villeneuve was happy with his performance. But when Villeneuve called him up while he was working on My Spy, this time with an offer to play a bigger role in his forthcoming adaptation of Dune, Bautista says he “almost broke down in tears”.

“To earn that type of respect was what I set out to do,” he explains. “At that moment I felt justified in leaving wrestling behind and starving for three years, building myself as an actor, trying to earn respect and passing up on those really bad, clichéd roles that would have paid a lot of bills at the time, especially when I needed the money.”

He sighs, expressing a flicker of pure contentment after so much talk of tears and insecurity. “I really felt like I had arrived as an actor.”

My Spy is in UK cinemas from Friday 13 March