You Cannot Kill David Arquette: From an actor with heart problems to becoming a pro wrestler
A scene from You Cannot Kill David Arquette.
As David Arquette returned home after having two stents placed in his heart, he mentioned to his wife Christina that he was considering a return to wrestling. At first, she thought he was joking - after all, just days before the actor had suffered a heart attack.
“It was intense,” he tells me from his LA home via Zoom. “I had a really bad reaction to a stress test. My heart started to seize up. Luckily, I was in a hospital but they had to get medicine from the fifth floor. So I had a while to think about it. Luckily, I got two stents put in my heart.” That was just a few years ago, and as he recovered he thought about the sport that is his lifelong passion.
“I said to my wife: ‘I've been thinking about wrestling a lot’. She thought I was crazy. She just didn't get it. But what it really was, was that I had to go on this journey to learn how to love myself and stop beating myself up. A lot happened in that time, you definitely look at life differently, you really cherish it a lot more. You want to make the most out of it.”
Arquette had notoriously been in the ring before. When promoting his film Ready to Rumble in 2000, he was awarded the WCW World Heavyweight Championship in a stunt that outraged wrestling fans. It was considered a low point in the sport. He was reviled by the community in the years since and abused at matches he attended.
“When somebody hates something you do, it usually doesn't last 20 years,” he says. “It's just never died. It was wild. I mean, I would go to wrestling matches with my wife and she'd see how mean some of the people were to me. She’d say: ‘I can't believe you put up with that, you're a sensitive person. Why would you even come here?’ And I was like: ‘Because I love wrestling’. I knew that I wanted to do a love letter to wrestling, that I felt bad about dishonouring the sport in a sense.”
His dismay at any harm he’d caused is sincere, as were his efforts to get back into the ring and become a proper wrestler in his late forties. The resulting documentary, You Cannot Kill David Arquette, is one of the year’s revelations - a hysterically funny, outrageous and moving film described by one critic as “the surprising lovechild of Sunset Boulevard and The Wrestler”.
Contributors to the film include his actor sisters Rosanna and Patricia while his ex-wife, Friends star Courtney Cox says of Arquette’s 2000 stint in the ring: “All of a sudden he wanted to do wrestling. There was nothing small about the way he embraced wrestling. He looked like he should have been in Earth, Wind and Fire.” The theatre continues, with a wizard costume among Arquette’s flamboyant new outfits.
Arquette has always seemed like a character who didn’t conform to the Hollywood model and marched to his own beat. From the memorable policeman in the Scream films to offbeat characters in US indies, he’s always had a likeability about him. But he has perhaps suffered for the movie industry’s inability to label him and put him in a box.
“I just do what I want. So there's a price to pay for that sometimes. Or if you do a commercial, there are certain things that can derail you as an actor. But it's also just a really tricky business. There's a lot of competition. I have worked, but it's been through people knowing my work or people I've worked with before.”
The documentary notoriously features a wrestling death match, a hardcore form where wrestlers swing chairs, baseball bats and in this case a florescent light tube. As rival Nick Gage hit him in the face and neck with the tube, sending blood gushing, did he consider whether he had gone too far?
“Traditional wrestlers, it's not really something they approve. Using certain things like light tubes is kind of frowned upon. And I know why now!” he laughs. “I was in over my head, for sure. I shouldn't have done it. I put myself in a really compromising situation and wouldn't do it again, but I wouldn't change the past. And I'm glad I lived.”
He has loved wrestling ever since watching it with his father, actor Lewis, as a young child. As one of a family of performers, the theatre of the sport is part of the appeal for him, he agrees.
“My family goes back to vaudeville. So there's something about the circus world and that performance and the larger than life element to it, that I really do love. But when you get involved in it, it really is a sport, you realise how much of a sport it is, once you start doing it regularly. And how much training it takes and how much your body has to go through.
“I learned so much about acting. There’s something about wrestling where you're not really using words, you're selling a lot non verbally with your body and with the story you're telling in the ring. And then when you can capture an audience like that, you can get them to believe and cheer, sometimes cry, it's really a magical thing.”
As well as getting him into peak shape (he lost 50lbs while training) wrestling was an emotional journey for the actor, not least because he got to spend time with close friend Luke Perry before his sudden death last year. When Arquette becomes seriously injured in the death match, it’s Perry who helps him to the hospital. The late actor’s son Jack is a professional wrestler, working as 'Jungle Boy' in the Warner-affiliated All Elite Wrestling. Perry was also close friends with Arquette’s sister Alexis, who died in 2016.
“I think about them a lot. My parents as well. This life, although it seems long, it's very quick. It can turn around in the blink of an eye. A lot has happened. So it's just important to live in the moment. And do the best you can.”
He recently completed filming on Scream 5 where he reprises the role of Dwight Riley, the character who made him a star. “It was really great to return to that role and work with Courtney and Nev again. We missed Wes Craven tremendously, but Matt and Tyler were incredible directors on it. They loved the world Wes had set up and really wanted to honour it.
“I'm just grateful to be able to work. I know so many people are going through such a hard time right now. And my heart goes out to them. I'm just happy that I can provide some entertainment hopefully that they'll enjoy.”
