On one hand he had the script, “We the People,” an ode to the Constitution. I have a lot of cover-ups, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but that’s just the story of my life.”ĭuring the turbulent summer of 2020, Bautista got a pair of tattoos he likely won’t ever need to cover. “Now I just have this great big tattoo on my belly, but it’s a story. “The cover-up just got bigger and bigger, trying to add into it and make it look right,” he says. The tattoo may have felt like a good move in the ’90s, but eventually something needed to be done about it. When he first broke into the WWE, he was going on national television with a tribal sun tattoo around his belly button. This would not be the only tattoo he would end up rethinking over the years. Every once in a while I’d get a comment about it in the locker room while I was wrestling and I was like, ‘Shut the fuck up, man, I’m sensitive about it!’” “Two days later I regretted it,” he says, “but it was there for years. He got ready, shaved the little hairs on my butt, then he rolls his stool up to my head and goes, ‘Man, are you sure you want this on your ass?’”Ĭommon sense did not rule the day and Bautista walked out of the shop with a tattoo on his ass. “It was a cement-looking heart and it said ‘Heart of Stone.’ I thought it was so tough. “I didn’t want my dad to see it, so I got this tattoo on my ass,” he laughs. There he met an affable biker who did everything he could to talk Bautista out of placing it where he did. As an 18-year-old kid, he walked into “an old redneck biker tattoo shop” looking for ink. Long before Bautista experienced the pleasures of becoming a biker himself, he visited a biker to get his very first tattoo. There’s something very freeing about it.” “You’re enjoying the Earth, enjoying the weather, enjoying the day, enjoying being alive. “ becomes very Zen, very relaxing, once you get somewhere where you aren’t even shifting anymore, you’re just riding,” he says.
Riding requires periods of intense focus-when navigating through clogged city streets filled with drivers oblivious to motorcycles, for example. Riding is more than a hobby for Bautista, it’s a way for him to keep centered. That’s the feeling I get from being on my bike.”
“When I watch a movie scene and I see a cowboy riding off into the sunset,” he continues, “that’s a happy ending. I really haven’t been able to do that in any film.
I get to really express myself as a performer, with everything from A to Z as a range.
There are moments where I get to be eyebrows-up sarcastic. “There are tons of emotional beats, I finally get to be a legit badass in this film. “Throughout my career I’ve had moments where I could show off this part of my range or that part of my range, but I’ve never had a film where I could put it all out there and showcase my range as an actor,” Bautista says. Following in the footsteps of the original zombie master, George Romero, the writers behind “Army of the Dead” crafted a fully fleshed character (pun intended) when they wrote Bautista’s role of Scott Ward. The film is a self-aware piece of genre fiction depicting a group of mercenaries conducting a heist in Las Vegas during a zombie apocalypse. It wasn’t until his most recent film, the upcoming Zach Snyder-directed “Army of the Dead,” where his acting career started clicking on all cylinders. “You would think that me being in a Marvel film and me looking like a human gorilla that Drax would be just a badass character,” he laughs, “but he gets his ass kicked more than any other character in the Marvel Universe.” Even in the roles where he’s been clearly typecast, like his star-turn in 2014’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Bautista’s hilarious performance as Drax the Destroyer shows he’s much more than just a big tough. He’s acted in a broad range of films, among them a neo-noir thriller (“Hotel Artemis”), a family film (“My Spy”), a straightforward action film (“Marauders”) and a buddy comedy (“Stuber”).