Dave Bautista’s secret; or, how pro wrestling saved the Hollywood action hero
Oliver Bateman
Once upon a time, Hollywood had a man’s man for every occasion. That time ended as Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and even bodybuilding box-office hero Arnold Schwarzenegger faded into retirement or receded via reduced workloads. In the 1940s and 1950s, you had your pick of rock-solid leading men forged by tough military service, such as Lee Marvin, Jimmy Stewart, and Sterling Hayden, of whom the likes of ex-Marine Hackman were merely continuations into the near present. Pro wrestlers figured into this mix to an extent, with Stanislaus Zbyszko, Kola Kwariani, Hard Boiled Haggerty (Don Stansauk), “Judo” Gene LeBell, and Mike Mazurki doing admirable work as supporting players or stunt coordinators.
Through the 1970s, when leading men came from athletic backgrounds, they were generally former NFL or MLB players — Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman Chuck Connors, Browns All-Pro running back Jim Brown, Kansas City Chiefs star defensive back Fred Williamson, Rams All-Pro defensive lineman Fred Dryer. And this remained true into the 1990s, when you could find major television shows fronted by men like Bill Cosby (a halfback and track athlete at Temple University) and Ed O’Neill (briefly in camp with the Pittsburgh Steelers, unlike the failed high school gridiron star he played on Married… with Children). There was a certain solidity, and a resulting gravitas, to these men. And there were enough of them that global wrestling superstar Hulk Hogan’s own late-1980s career as a leading man was confined to underperforming films and television shows directed at children. Meanwhile, talented wrestlers like Jesse “The Body” Ventura and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper would have to content themselves with interesting supporting parts and memorable leading roles in offbeat low-budget pictures.
Now, however, the stage masculinity of the pro wrestler, which seemed cartoonish in the 1980s when set against the likes of Hackman or Eastwood, is the best of what’s around. Dave Bautista in A Knock at the Cabin offers a textbook example of this: In his commitment to the aversion of an impending apocalypse, his brick wall-like body all but subsumes the ostensible leads, married couple Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge).
Former pro wrestler Bautista casts a large shadow over M. Night Shyamalan’s new film. As Leonard, a towering presence with a quiet sensibility, Bautista carries the weight of the world on his shoulders as he proceeds to terrorize a hapless couple and their daughter in order to secure the sacrifice needed to stop an impending apocalypse.
Most of the film is rote thriller stuff, but Bautista’s leading-man chops and understated delivery lend it surprising heft. It should come as no surprise that Bautista is able to emote this way — after all, he cut his teeth as the hulking “Batista” in arguably the most intense crucible for would-be action stars, the WWE, before breaking out as a bankable movie star as deadpan Drax the Destroyer in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
It is equally unsurprising that two of the biggest action stars of the modern era, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena, took their bumps and honed their microphone skills in WWE rings. The Rock, who has banked over $5 billion in worldwide box office across 27 leading roles, has succeeded by following the path of interchangeable blockbusters built around advancing his brand. Cena, by contrast, routinely plays against type: the alpha-male-as-clueless-goof, a character he debuted in a supporting turn as a closeted gay man in Amy Schumer’s comedy Trainwreck and has parlayed into a leading role on HBO’s Peacemaker series.
Meanwhile, generic pretty boy leading men — most from modeling, comedy, or acting backgrounds and only a few, like normie Adam Driver, with any military experience — have all had to beef up to play the innumerable superheroes who invaded the cineplex over the preceding two decades. A great deal of time and attention goes into making these actors look like the “leading men” they are not. Why else would Kumail Nanjiani, a perfectly fine nebbish actor in the Woody Allen mold, pack on gratuitous size for a co-starring role in Marvel’s underwhelming Eternals film? Some actors are now even playing pro wrestlers, such as Chris Hemsworth, who has stayed swole since he started playing Thor. Hemsworth will star as Hulk Hogan in a Hogan biopic, while 5-foot-8-inch Zac Efron of High School Musical fame has packed on copious pounds of muscle to portray 6-foot-2-inch Kevin Von Erich in a film about Texas’s star-crossed wrestling family.
Although it was certainly not director Shyamalan’s intention to meditate on the point of masculine men, Bautista serves as the moral compass of the Knock at the Cabin. He is willing to die for his beliefs as Eric and Andrew initially are not, and the bizarro future he foretells actually comes to pass. He is, for all intents and purposes, the movie’s steadying influence, with his own suicide prompting Groff and Aldridge to finally make the arbitrary but not capricious choice he has forced upon them. Bautista, in short, functions as an Old Testament figure ordering yet never explaining the rationale behind the necessity of binding a latter-day Isaac to the altar and sacrificing him.
In terms of credible leading men, Bautista and other wrestlers who follow in his footsteps may be as good as we’re going to get. No great universal conflict or other shared catastrophic experience seems likely to yield another crop of performers like the men who served in World War II — unless one counts the recent lockdowns that prompted celebrities to sing uplifting songs together over Zoom. As more ersatz action heroes like Nanjiani and Efron emerge by dint of exercise and careful “supplementation,” the quotes here denoting possible and perhaps likely performance-enhancing drug use, the effect will be akin to that produced by song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman, who is wonderful when it comes to hosting the Tony Awards but miscast as Wolverine in the various X-Men films.
Some among us still crave authenticity in our all-too-human actors. And wrestlers, who are trained to safely absorb real blows while emoting pretend pain, have spent years forging direct somatic connections with their audience in ways Efron and Hemsworth will never be able to imitate. The future of the leading man remains uncertain, but for now, Dave Bautista might be the best we’ve got.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.