Dave Bautista has done pretty well for himself, considering that he didn’t get into the acting business until he was into his 40s. After starting out like many wrestlers-turned-actors do in mid budget action and adventure movies, the former WWE star made a concerted attempt to broaden his horizons and tackle the sort of material people wouldn’t expect from a man of his dimensions.
The approach has yielded huge rewards so far, too, with his Guardians of the Galaxy director Jame Gunn explaining why Bautista has made the most successful transition from the squared circle to the big screen, even if he’s not landing the sort of regular blockbuster roles as his contemporaries Dwayne Johnson and John Cena.
The 52 year-old is also a huge self-confessed pop culture nerd, and one of his main hobbies is collecting antique lunchboxes. Not to mention that he’s an avid reader of comic books and a lifelong enthusiast of the horror genre, so it isn’t surprising to find out that Bautista is a massive fan of The Walking Dead. In fact, he revealed in a recent interview that he’d been lobbying for a guest spot as a zombie on the show, but was told he might be a little on the large side.
“I tried to get on Walking Dead for years. I said I would come and play a zombie for free, but they said, ‘You’re too big!’.”
There are no reasons why zombies can’t be a little larger than the average human, but luckily for Bautista, he’ll be able to get his fix of the undead after headlining Zack Snyder’s zombie heist thriller Army of the Dead, which hits Netflix later this year and should more than make up for his disappointment at not getting to stumble around in the background of The Walking Dead.
