Dave Bautista Reveals Why He Wants to Play Batman Villain Bane so Badly

Wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista‘s breakout role came in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, with the performer not only helping launch the entire team of superheroes, but also kickstarting an all-new career for himself, though the actor is still hoping he could get the chance to play DC Comics’ Bane in a live-action adventure, with his hopes being to offer another interpretation of the character than what we saw in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. While Bautista expressed his respect for Tom Hardy’s portrayal of the character, he feels as though he could embrace the iconic villain’s physicality in a new way, while also conveying a twisted intelligence.

“There are certain characters I’ve latched on to over the past 10, 20 years, and Bane was one of them,” Bautista recalled to Collider. “No discredit to Tom Hardy’s version of Bane, I love that performance, I loved that film. I’d just love a crack at it. I think I could bring an interesting twist to it and I think I could do the character justice. Not only in performance, but also in physicality. I’d love that role where I’d have to go back up to 320 pounds just to play this character, like that it would happen. I could … play Bane in a way that’s not only menacing and ominous but also freakishly intelligent. Bane would be the type of character that’s so menacing and so terrifying and so intelligent, he would hardly ever raise his voice.”

Were Bautista to play the villain in a Batman film, he would follow not only Hardy’s take on the character, but also Bane’s appearance in 1997’s Batman & Robin. That film, however, was much campier in tone, with Bane serving merely as the henchman for Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy, allowing makeup and prosthetics to amplify wrestler/stuntman Robert Swenson’s already impressive stature.

While Bautista is signed on for another Guardians of the Galaxy film, he managed to unofficially capture the essence of the Bane he would like to play, as he embraced those characteristics for his performance of Mr. Hinx in the James Bond film Spectre.

“Mr. Hinx, he was so terrifying, his demeanor hardly ever changed. He was very happy to be beating the hell out of someone,” the actor confessed. “He wasn’t super overly aggressive, he was just so confident in what he was doing. That’s the way I perceive Bane to be as well. He would not only be physically superior, he’d be mentally superior. I love the idea of the challenge of playing that character. I like when you can play a brute who’s not your predictable brute. Any big muscular guy can play the guy who is screaming, and growling, and yelling. But if you play a guy who is not only physically menacing but also soft-spoken, and even more terrifying when he’s speaking to you softly with a smile on his face, then that is a villain.”

The Batman is currently slated to hit theaters next year, but it’s unclear when Bane could be making his way to the big screen. Bautista will next be seen in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, which hits theaters on May 14th and Netflix on May 21st.

Would you like to see Bautista take on the role? Let us know in the comments below!