Although former WWE and World Heavyweight Champion Dave Bautista has seen great success in the film world starring alongside the Hollywood elite as Drax the Destroyer in the Marvel franchise, his acting career came to be somewhat out of spite for the WWE.
In 2010, “The Animal” Batista was riding a career high as the WWE Champion and main eventing WrestleMania 26 with John Cena. But “Big Dave” still felt he could improve as a performer and asked WWE if he could take some time off the road as he wished to take acting classes. WWE had other ideas though as Batista revealed in a recent interview,
“It came about out of spite. First it came from me discovering I was a horrible actor. I wanted to become a better actor and I wanted to do it while I was still with WWE. They would not give me the opportunity within the company. I said that I should be given the opportunity to do it outside of the company, and they said ‘absolutely not.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to let my contract run out, and I’m gonna leave.’ So that’s exactly what I did and I set out to be an actor.”
While many see this as a gamble that definitely paid off for the former champion, Batista is a little more realistic about that time in his career,
“It was brave and maybe a little stupid [laughs]. It was three years of me barely working. You know, [I had] a nice thing with the WWE. I made a very good living there. I was very comfortable and I could have stuck with that, but I just wanted to do something else.”
