Dave Bautista Has One Dream Role He Wants to Play More Than Bane: Ernest Hemingway

Zack Sharf
·3 min read
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Dave Bautista is an action movie staple thanks to roles in “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the just-released Netflix zombie movie “Army of the Dead,” but it turns out the actor’s dream role couldn’t be more anti-action movie. In a recent interview with Polygon, Bautista revealed his passion project is an Ernest Hemingway biographical drama in which he stars as the iconic novelist behind “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and more. Well, it’s ether Hemingway or the Batman villain Bane, although Hemingway has the edge at the moment.

“I’ve given a lot of thought to inspirational stories I could play, interesting stories I could play,” Bautista said. “And the one that seems to keep coming back to me is Ernest Hemingway. If I could play any character, I still think it would be him. I think I could do him justice. I think he’s so interesting, everything about his life, and the way he lived, and also the way he died. It’s just very intriguing, his ideas are intriguing to me.”

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Bautista added, “I’ve also been very vocal lately about playing Bane in the DC Universe, and I still feel very strongly that I could do that character justice. So fiction vs. non-fiction, that would be Bane or Ernest Hemingway.”

Bane is such a dream role for Bautista that he once held a meeting with executives at Warner Bros. and DC Films to tell them he wants his own Bane movie. The actor recalled last month, “I walked in the door and said, ‘I want to play Bane.’ I’m not kidding. They were a little like. ‘Woah, we’re not even casting Bane.’ I was like ‘I don’t care, I’m playing him.’”

While it may come as a surprise to hear Ernest Hemingway is Bautista’s other dream role, it checks out given his wish to not be boxed into the action genre where the only thing that matters are his physical skills. In an interview with Uproxx earlier this month, Bautista praised his role in Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049” for opening up doors for him in Hollywood as, unlike “Guardians in the Galaxy,” it was the first studio movie he could show off some dramatic acting chops.

“That was the opportunity that I was looking for because I don’t get offered roles like that a lot,” Bautista said. “At that point, nobody was offering me roles like that. It was hard for people to see past my physicality and see that I actually wanted to…I used to tell people when I was just coming up, even after I got Drax, I was like I just really want to do some acting. I want to be a better actor. I want to do some drama. People would kind of giggle at me.”

If Bautista ever gets the chance to play Ernest Hemingway, he’ll definitely be “doing some acting.” The performer just landed a role in Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out 2,” and his Netflix film “Army of the Dead” is now streaming.

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