I Struggled With Playing Drax Character – Dave Bautista

Drax actor Dave Bautista may have captured fans with his hilarious portrayal of the character but he reveals that he struggled with the role at first.

Transitioning from wrestling to the big screen as an actor is never easy but guys like Dwayne Johnson and John Cena have pulled it off, with Bautista following in their trail.

While speaking with Smallville star Michael Rosenbaum on an episode of Inside of You, the former wrestling star stated that as an actor he prefers dramatic roles to comic ones.

What I really want to do, I like drama. Just regular old drama. Those roles for me are hard to get a hold of, but I’m constantly searching for them. But I’m limited sometimes. Sometimes it’s really hard to get people to look outside the box and see someone like myself in those roles.”

He also disclosed that Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn made the decision to tap into his humor for the second film.

And it’s weird, the role in the first one, James Gunn rewrote it, and Drax was written very differently in the second one. The second one, I think James kind of tapped into my humor a little bit in the first one and decided that he wanted to put more of that in the second one. But in the first film, the comedic stuff was a challenge for me. I struggled with it. Some of that stuff they reshot, like, ‘Nothing goes over my head.’ Because they wanted to get a sense of Drax being such a literal character.

The stuff in the first film that I looked forward to was the dramatic stuff, like Drax talking about his family being murdered right in front of him. Stuff like that scene, the really hard scene, was cut out. It was cut out of the film, because it was just kind of slow and dark. But that was the kind of stuff I was really looking forward to.”

Well, it comes as a bit of surprise that the burly star doesn’t really dig comic roles because he seems to be a natural at playing those roles. What matters to fans is that he brings the hilarious effect that his character is meant to.