Dave Bautista recently told content creator Chris Van Vliet that his recent weight loss can be attributed to his acting career, mainly because he doesn’t want to appear too “distracting” on camera opposite his more normal-sized co-stars. The “Guardians of the Galaxy” favorite said he’s “absolutely” been trimming down to play a more diverse range of acting roles.
“I started trimming down because I got really big for a role. Uncomfortably big,” Bautista said. “For ‘Knock at the Cabin’ I got really big. I was around 315 pounds…I put the weight on really fast and I put on an uncomfortable amount of weight and it took forever to shed it out.”
Bautista decided it was time to lose some weight, and as the pounds came off he realized that not only was he feeling better emotionally but he was also becoming more natural on screen.
“The more I trimmed down the better I looked on camera and the better I looked next to other actors,” he explained. “I’m still a large human being. At 6’4 and 240 pounds next to your typical actor, I look like a gorilla and it’s distracting. I’ll probably lose a few more pounds. I’m just killing myself to be this trim. I’m training hard.”
While Bautista felt that he got too big for “Knock at the Cabin,” the M. Night Shyamalan-directed thriller did mark a shift to the kind of challenging acting roles that he’s seeking after his tenure playing Drax the Destroyer in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As he told GQ magazine in 2023: “I just want to be a good fucking actor. A respected actor.” For this reason, Bautista has always cherished his collaborations with Denis Villeneuve, such as “Blade Runner 2049” and the “Dune” films.
“I’ve never had a director until Denis, since Denis, say to me that you’re a very strong actor,” Bautista told Gizmodo earlier this year. “And he said this to me on the first film. I was holding back because I was self-conscious [and] I was. I was very unsure of myself. And he came to me. He said, ‘I feel like you’re holding back. You’re a very strong actor, my friend. Just follow your instincts.’ And so I started belting it out, and I started finding this character. He not only loved it so much, but he was so supportive of my performance that he wanted to capture other people’s reactions to my performance. And so when you’re getting that kind of support, that was an experience I’ve never had before or since, with a director of that caliber. So it means everything. It’s validation.”
Watch Bautista’s full interview with Van Vliet in the video below.
Source Agencies
