In one of the most respectable acts of shooting your shot in recent memory, Dave Bautista revealed he once told Warner Bros. he was their perfect Bane, whether the studio was currently looking to cast Bane or not. While the actor hasn't actually nabbed the iconic Batman villain role (yet!), we absolutely had to know what a Bautista Bane would look like. So when we sat down with the man himself recently to talk Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead, we also asked for a tease of what he'd do under the mask. 

Here's what Bautista told us: 

"There are certain characters I’ve latched on to over the past 10, 20 years, and Bane was one of them. No discredit to Tom Hardy’s version of Bane, I love that performance, I loved that film. I’d just love a crack at it. I think I could bring an interesting twist to it and I think I could do the character justice. Not only in performance, but also in physicality. I’d love that role where I’d have to go back up to 320 pounds just to play this character, like that it would happen. I could...play Bane in a way that’s not only menacing and ominous but also freakishly intelligent. Bane would be the type of character that’s so menacing and so terrifying and so intelligent, he would hardly ever raise his voice. 

Intriguingly, Bautista compared the Bane in his head to another major franchise role from earlier in his career: Mr. Hinx, the silent-but-extremely-deadly heavy from Daniel Craig's fourth James Bond film, Spectre

"Mr. Hinx, he was so terrifying, his demeanor hardly ever changed. He was very happy to be beating the hell out of someone. He wasn’t super overly aggressive, he was just so confident in what he was doing. That’s the way I perceive Bane to be as well. He would not only be physically superior, he’d be mentally superior. I love the idea of the challenge of playing that character. I like when you can play a brute who’s not your predictable brute. Any big muscular guy can play the guy who is screaming, and growling, and yelling. But if you play a guy who is not only physically menacing but also soft-spoken, and even more terrifying when he’s speaking to you softly with a smile on his face, then that is a villain."

According to Bautista, his Bane request isn't the only time he's lobbied a studio for a role he feels passionate about. The Army of the Dead star described a meeting at Universal to discuss The Fast and the Furious franchise, which he mostly took to gauge the studio's interest in a Gears of War adaptation with Dave Bautista in the lead. 

"I don’t make any pretense about it. I had a chance to get a meeting at WB, they were talking to me about this and that and I said 'hey, let’s talk about Bane.' That happened to me one other time in my career. They wanted to talk to me about Fast and the Furious, and I said 'I’m not interested, let’s talk about [Gears of War character] Marcus Fenix'..."

Check out exactly what Bautista had to say in the player above—which also gives you a better idea of what his Bane would sound like—and be on the lookout for the full interview (which also includes stories about making Army of the Dead, Blade Runner 2049, Dune, and Guardians of the Galaxy, and more) later this week. Army of the Dead debuts in theaters on May 14 and on Netflix May 21.

KEEP READING: Dave Bautista Says Marvel "Dropped the Ball" on Drax's Backstory, But Is Still Looking Forward to Finishing the Character's Journey