M. Night Shyamalan Says Blade Runner 2049 Scene Convinced Him to Cast Dave Bautista for New Movie

Dave Bautista is best known for playing Drax in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it was another role that caught the attention of M. Night Shyamalan, the director known for The Sixth Sense, Signs, and more. It was recently announced that Bautista will be joining Shyamalan’s next movie, Knock at the Cabin. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Shyamalan revealed that Bautista’s performance in Blade Runner 2049 is the reason he wanted to work with him. 

“I was really taken by what Denis [Villeneuve] and Dave did in that scene in Blade Runner,” Shyamalan explained. “He was still in a way that was powerful. There’s a type of stillness where you’re not doing nothing; you’re doing everything and you’re still. Your essence of what you’re thinking is coming off your body. I always tell actors that I can definitely shoot the back of you. If you watch the back of Heath Ledger at the beginning of The Dark Knight, the second I saw his back, I thought, ‘I’m seeing one of the greatest performances ever.’ I could see it just from the way he was standing.” 

The director continued, “Every cell in your body will do what it’s supposed to do if you’re thinking something correctly. So don’t just be blank. You have to think it. So don’t show me anything because your body is going to show me. And Dave was embodying all of this philosophy in that scene, and I thought he was a really unusual person because he is who he is and he’s that big. I didn’t know who he was at that time, and he stuck in my head. So when this script came, I was like, ‘There seems to be one guy who can play this giant human being and do the stillness.’ So I asked Dave.”

Very little is known about Knock at the Cabin, but Shyamalan has offered some updates about the thriller via Twitter. Back in August, he wrote that he’d completed the most recent draft of “the next one,” calling it, “Super tight, Under a 100 pages.” 

“I’m loving this approach from The Visit on where they’re minimal, contained, I own them, we take big tonal risks and try to hit that note of absurd-but-grounded, that dark humor moment and deal with some complicated things and not necessarily take the audience where they’re comfortable, both during or even at the end,” the filmmaker shared with Collider in 2019. “That’s all mitigated because we’re working with a respectable number and I feel like I’m being a good partner to my distributors. I like that because it allows me to iterate really fast in the making of these stories, so those films follow that architecture of approach and process. Even if it’s tricking myself into being more dangerous, it’s working because when I think about these three films that I’m thinking about — all weird and dark — I think that they speak to each other a little bit.”

Are you excited for Dave Bautista to star in Shyamalan’s next movie? Tell us in the comments!