Dave Bautista Is In Negotiations To Play The Kurgan In Chad Stahelski's 'Highlander' Reboot

Dave Bautista known for his role as Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy films is reportedly in negotiations to play The Kurgan in Chad Stahelski’s Highlander reboot.

Deadline reports that Bautista is in negotiations with Amazon MGM Studios to not only play The Kurgan in the Highlander reboot, but for an unknown role in Road House 2.

The Highlander film was originally at Lionsgate, but found a new home at Amazon’s United Artists studio back in April. The reboot has been in the works for years going as far back as 2017 where Stahleski informed Collider he wanted to make both films and TV shows with the series.

He said, “We’re currently doing a bit of work on the overall plot structure. When I came on board, they were trying to reinvent the single Highlander property. We’ve gone since back in and we would like to really expand the world, so we consider the same shortcomings don’t happen again that happened on the original project, meaning you have one great movie and four questionable followups.”

“We want to develop a property that can give us — and again it’s not about marketing, it’s not so much about the financials, it’s about how can we make a more mythological, chapter one, chapter two, what’s a great way to tell this story,” he said.

Cavill boarded the project in 2021 and spoke about his role and character on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast back in February 2024. He said, “Obviously, I’ve watched them when I was a lot younger and since rewatched, but also the TV show. I really enjoyed the lore behind it. That sort of sense of a tragic warrior with more of a story to tell rather than just a cool guy with a sword doing cool things. And this goes even deeper into that.”

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Stahelski provided more details about Cavill’s character as well as the plot of the film.

He told The Direct back in November, “We're bringing it forward from the early 1500s in the highlands to the beyond present-day New York and Hong Kong, and seeing how it goes.”

“There's big opportunity for action,” he continued. “There's a chance to play a character that not a lot of people get to play. And it's a bit of a love story, but not how you think.”

As for Cavill’s character he revealed, “My selling point was, to [Henry Cavill], look, you've got a guy that's been alive for over 500 years. He's the last person in the world that wanted to be in this situation. So you get to cover quite a broad spread of a character arc there.”

Stahelski added, “And you get to experience someone that's trained over 500 years and sort of played [with many types of] martial arts..."

What do you make of Bautista playing The Kurgan in this Highlander reboot?

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