Dave Bautista's Dream Role Surprised Everyone, Us Included

Dave Bautista is an in-demand actor thanks to his roles in movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Army of the Dead, but the 52-year-old actor has a few dream roles he's still chasing. Bautista revealed his dream roles in a new interview with Polygon.

"I've given a lot of thought to inspiration stories I could play, interesting stories I could play. 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," Bautista said. "I think he's so interesting, everything about his life and the way he lived, and also the way he died."

Ernest Hemingway was an American author known as much for his influential stories like Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms as he was for his adventurous lifestyle, which included four marriages, driving an ambulance in World War I, covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, and two plane crashes on successive days in Africa, just to name a few. Hemingway died by suicide in 1961.

The actor has been more vocal about his other big dream role: DC villain Bane. Bautista reiterates his desire to play the villain, body builder and master strategist who wears a Mexican wrestling mask and pumps himself up with a fluorescent green super-steroid called Venom. Bautista confirmed last summer that he's tried--and failed--to claim this role in future Batman movies.

Bautista also said back in 2018 that he wanted to bring video game series Gears of War to life with him as protagonist Marcus Fenix, and he confirmed just last week that he passed on a Fast & Furious role to lobby Universal about Gears of War.

"I had a meeting at Universal and they wanted to talk about Fast & Furious and I said, 'I'm not interested. Let's talk about Marcus Fenix.' I think they were a little put off," Bautista said.

You can watch Bautista at work in Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead, which is streaming right now on Netflix.