Related Articles
Actor Dave Bautista has spoken about the great lengths he went to in his campaign to play Marcus Fenix in the Gears of War movie. Speaking to Collider, Bautista said he had a meeting with Universal Studios because they wanted to speak to him about the Fast & Furious franchise. But Bautista shifted the conversation to Universal’s Gears of War movie, which he was personally more interested in.
Bautista said he meant no disrespect to change the subject of the meeting, but his heart wasn’t in Fast & Furious.
“I had a meeting at Universal and they wanted to talk to me about Fast & Furious and I said, ‘I’m not interested. Let’s talk about Marcus Fenix.’ I think they were a little put off. I don’t mean to offend anybody. I’m not playing down anything else,” he said. “I’m just saying this [Gears of War] is way more interesting to me. I don’t want to pretend I’m interested in something that I’m not when there’s something I’m actually really excited about.”
“This is what I love, I’m seriously passionate about this,” Bautista added, recalling that he told the executives that he believed he could do a good job as Fenix. He just wanted to be considered for the part, Bautista said, but apparently it didn’t work out.
“I don’t see any harm in chasing your dreams or being honest with someone and saying this is what I’m really passionate about,” he said. “I think when people are more personally invested, it’s just going to be a better product.”
Bautista brought this up as an example of a second time that he pitched a studio on a part, the first being the role of Bane in the Batman films. Bautista said he loves Tom Hardy’s performance in The Dark Knight Rises, but he would have liked to have a shot at it.
“I think I could bring an interesting twist to it and I think I could do the character justice,” he said. “Not only in performance, but also in physicality.”
Back in 2019, Bautista said on Twitter that he was doing everything he could to get cast as Fenix in the Gears of War movie, but it wasn’t working, for reasons that have never come to light.
More recently, Bautista has been in the news for his comments around Drax, his character from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series. Bautista recently said that Marvel “dropped the ball” on giving Drax a proper backstory in the films.
As for the Gears of War movie, it’s been in the works since 2007, but there is still no word on a cast, director, or a filming start-date.
Rod Fergusson, the former studio head at Gears developer The Coalition, said in 2019 that the film “has to be a great movie first and a Gears movie second.”
“Basically the way that we sort of reconciled that was, we said, ‘Oh, the movie should be an alternate reality. It should not be dependent on the game story, nor should it influence the game story,'” he said.
