Iconic Batman villain Bane has been seen in two live-action movies so far, albeit in markedly different form. In Joel Schumacher’s disastrous Batman & Robin, he was a hulking brute that didn’t speak as played by wrestler and stuntman Jeep Swenson, who passed away from heart failure just weeks after the movie was released at the age of only 40.
Fast forward fifteen years and Tom Hardy donned the mask for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, where we saw a completely different Bane. He was still jacked after Hardy packed on 30 pounds of muscle, but he was a much more intelligent and articulate presence, even if the combination of the actor’s choice of accent and the sound design made him often indecipherable.
There’ve been rumors that Bane could be making his way back to the big screen, potentially as part of Robert Pattinson’s rebooted universe, and Dave Bautista has been regularly named as a potential candidate to play him. It’s something he’s desperate to do, too, after he admitted in a new interview that he demanded Warner Bros. cast him as the supervillain, despite the fact that he was meeting with them for something entirely different at the time.
“Oh, it would be Bane all day long. I’ve made no secret about this. I want to play Bane so bad I went to Warner Bros., had an appointment with them, had an appointment with DC, walked in the door and said, ‘I want to play Bane’. I’m not kidding. They were a little like, ‘Woah, we’re not even casting Bane’. I was like, ‘I don’t care, I’m playing him’.”
Bautista is arguably the middle ground between both live-action versions of Bane, given that he’s a former professional wrestler like Swenson but also a very well-spoken man and a highly dedicated actor in the vein of Hardy. Throw in the fact that he clearly wants the role the next time it becomes available, and it’s surely an opportunity staring the studio right in the face that they wouldn’t be able to turn down.
Tell us, though, would you like to see the actor get the gig? Let us know down below.