MCU Star Couldn't Cut It on The Walking Dead for a Hilarious Reason

But before he reached that high point of his acting career, he appeared or wanted to appear in a number of movies and series (sometimes as his real-life wrestler self). But either those roles were too minor, or he faced rejection.

For example, Bautista tried hard to get into The Walked Dead, because he is a long-time enjoyer of that sort of fiction. He even made a unique offer to the showrunners:

"I'm a zombie fan. I tried to get on Walking Dead for years. I said I would come and play a zombie for free."

But even that proposal got rejected for a reason that, once you think about it, should be obvious, yet nevertheless remains hilarious. Bautista himself revealed it in an interview with Empire:

"But they said, 'You're too big!'"

Sure thing, as any zombie affictionado knows, "big" means "disproportionally dangerous bullet sponge" when it comes to zombies, so the showrunners did not want to unleash such a tank on their cast!

Jokes aside, Bautista finally realized his dream of playing in a zombie story, when he got the main character role in Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021), a heist movie on the background of Las Vegas overrun by zombies.

While it is harder to tell how much of a success Army of the Dead was, given that it was primarily distributed through streaming, apparently it did well enough to warrant a sequel.

The reception by both professional critics and Internet reviewers was moderately positive.

Unfortunately for Bautista, his character, Scott Ward, does not survive the extremely gory movie – the "zombie" part of the Army of the Dead's identity got precedence over the "heist" part, so nearly all of the cast got wiped out by the end.

Even if Army of the Dead is going to become a franchise, Bautista would have to look elsewhere for his post-MCU employment, for which he already has plans and hopes.