Dave Bautista Turned Down Fast & Furious to Pitch Gears of War Role

Guardians of the Galaxy and Army of the Dead star Dave Bautista has revealed that he turned down the chance to appear in the Fast & Furious franchise at the cost of instead pitching his idea for a movie based on the Gears of War video game series. Bautista said that this is one of the only instances in his career in which he’s done such a thing, although it doesn’t sound like

In a new interview with Collider, Bautista opened up about how he had once taken a meeting with those over at Warner Bros. to essentially lobby himself to play the role of Bane, the iconic villain from the Batman franchise. The former WWE superstar went on to say that the only other time he has done such a thing was with Universal. At one point, the film production company had a meeting with Bautista to pitch him on the idea of joining the Fast & Furious series. Instead, Bautista had other plans.

“I don’t make any pretense about it. I had a chance to get a meeting at WB, they were talking to me about this and that and I said ‘hey, let’s talk about Bane.’ That happened to me one other time in my career. They wanted to talk to me about Fast and the Furious, and I said ‘I’m not interested, let’s talk about Marcus Fenix,’” Bautista explained. For those unaware, Fenix is the central protagonist from the Gears of War series, which first debuted on Xbox 360 back in 2006.

Over the years, Bautista has made his voice heard in quite a public manner that he wants to one day play Marcus Fenix in a Gears of War movie. At this point, a movie based on the video game franchise has been quietly in the works at Universal for quite some time, but it has never gotten off of the ground to the point where the studio would begin attaching actors to the project.

To make up for this, though, Bautista finally had his wish come true to some degree back in 2019 when The Coalition put him in Gears 5 as a playable character. While Bautista was at first only controllable in multiplayer, the collaboration eventually went one step further and his character model could also be seen in the game’s campaign. For now, this is as close as Bautista has gotten to actually playing Fenix, but perhaps that will all change one day.

So what do you think about this new information? Would you have liked to have seen Bautista appear in the Fast & Furious saga? And are you still hopeful that a Gears of War movie will one day hit theaters? Let me know your thoughts either down in the comments or over on Twitter at @MooreMan12.