While making appearances for The Killer’s Game, Bautista is turning heads with a dramatic new look as he shed a lot of weight.
Although he’s predominantly played comedic characters in some fairly light-hearted films, Dave Bautista is taking his crossover into movies seriously. The muscular star, who is one of the few truly successful wrestler-turned-actors, has a new action-comedy coming out with J.J. Perry’s The Killer’s Game, in which he takes on a bevy of hitmen looking to close on a price on his head. While he remained bulked up for the film, fans may be noticing how slimmer and trimmer the former WWE and Guardians of the Galaxy star is looking while on press tour and for the premiere.
According to Variety, Bautista is strategically trimming down in order to play more diverse roles in his career going forward. He explains, “I started trimming down because I got really big for a role. Uncomfortably big. For Knock at the Cabin I got really big. I was around 315 pounds…I put the weight on really fast and I put on an uncomfortable amount of weight and it took forever to shed it out.” He continues, “The more I trimmed down the better I looked on camera and the better I looked next to other actors. I’m still a large human being. At 6’4 and 240 pounds next to your typical actor, I look like a gorilla and it’s distracting. I’ll probably lose a few more pounds. I’m just killing myself to be this trim. I’m training hard.”
Recently, Bautista spoke about how he never gets offered against-type roles like a romantic lead, and after he addressed that aspect of his career, the universe would answer back. At the Los Angeles premiere of The Killer’s Game, he found himself surprised when he said his comments “sparked quite a conversation, but I started getting a lot of phone calls after that.” He continues, “I said that and started getting calls immediately. So we’ve got a couple that we’re developing that are actually really funny.” Finally, he said he’s “making his way there, like a full-on rom-com. Not like an action rom-com, a full-on rom-com.”
The synopsis of The Killer’s Game reads,
“In the new action-comedy THE KILLER’S GAME, when top hitman Joe Flood (Dave Bautista) is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he decides to take matters into his own hands – by taking a hit out on himself. But when the very hitmen he hired also target his ex-girlfriend (Sofia Boutella), he must fend off an army of assassin colleagues and win back the love of his life before it’s too late.”
