David Arquette is in his place. The horse makes the last few steps up the mountain, until magical hour strikes with just the right note of confusion.
Centered in her natural light is the actor, slouched over the saddle. A layer of the floor-length magician’s cloak hangs from him, draping open to open the star’s shirtless belly, a light punch folding onto the saddle.
‘I’m sick of being a joke, being honest with you,’ he says, pulling a vape pen to his lips and inhaling as he looks at the sight. ‘If you’re part of the joke, it’s not as painful as you are the joke. Hollywood does not take me seriously. The kind of media thinks I’m a bit of a joke. Many of these people have not seen what I can do in a ring. ”
It does not take long to learn that the combination between clown and therapist is the exact space in which David Arquette lives. Or that the statements he makes about wrestling, as in the television scuffle pageant that Donald Trump counts among her interlocutors with celebrities, are as sincere as they come.
Twenty years ago, Arquette infiltrated the world of professional wrestling to promote his film Ready to rumble. Producers and the organization determined that he would win the belt and become world champion wrestler. It was such a disaster that even his then-wife, Friends star Courteney Cox, published her embarrassment publicly. To this day, fans still consider it one of the worst moments in wrestling history.
You can not kill David Arquette, a new documentary from Friday about his titular (still alive) star, centered on redemption. It’s the apology tour of bootstraps of a lifelong wrestling fan who wants to prove that, if not back then at least now, he deserves a place in the ring. More broadly, the 48-year-old also deserves a happy, healthy life after suffering a heart attack and placing two stents.
With his wife, Christina McLarty Arquette, by his side; his ex-wife in his corner; his famous sisters, Oscar winner Patricia and #MeToo fighter Rosanna in the bleachers; and his three children cheer him on, it’s also time to prove that, whatever Hollywood has decided about him and his career, he’s taking control of his own story.
He’s a goofy man, but he’s serious about it. He will become a wrestler. Wer.
That grin, crawling across his face like a robbery until it explodes into a butterfly, starts to creep up when I ask Arquette about that horse scene.
It is bad to say, when it comes to his sincerity contrasting with the absurdity of the image at hand, when it is more or less ridiculous than the time we see him sitting in a dumb ukulele sitting in an Adirondack chair the height of a suburban ranch house, its size almost completely envelops it as it grows poetic: ‘There’s an element that no one really wants to grow up in, you know? I love the way kids see the world. I hate growing up. ”
“Wrestling is funny,” he tells me in a recent Zoom call, acknowledging that the visual absurdity was on the part of producers who want to make a visually interesting film. However, the nuggets of wisdom are all real. ‘Wrestling is serious. Wrestling is terrible. Wrestling is challenging. And we wanted to explore that all in this movie. ”
If you do not think David Arquette takes it seriously at this point – his health, his family, his acting career and wrestling – well, then the joke is on you.
Choose a metaphor to match Arquette’s recent attempt to return to the ring.
A lifelong fan of wrestling, a source of bond with his father, that fans who worship the sport with an Olympic reverence remember his short ’90s bow with such malice is an itch that plagued him for decades
There was a time when TMZ could also have paid him royalties, seeing the amount of videos and news stories the Hollywood dish site has minted from the Never kiss die in various states of intoxication and cohesion.
The actor, who once on the cover of Vanity FairThe Hollywood release, is upright about the fact that he has been auditioning for the last 10 years without any of the juicy parts he was looking for. “Who would go out for 10 years of job interviews and not get one, and go out even more?” he says.
In You can not kill David Arquette, you see him humbly in the house of Virginia from some amateur wrestling enthusiasts who, although he is the most famous celebrity they have ever had in their backyard, boo him.
You can see that muscle definition starts to poke his potbelly as he prepares for a redemptive return to the sport.
You see him training in Mexico, paying his dues by wrestling in the streets of Tijuana, jumping off a ladder into the arms of amateur luchadores at a traffic light and panhandling for tips, just a hint of the acrobatics that he could pull away weeks later when he comes back with the circuit.
You see the joy where all this is covered in the press, unaware of the healing journey at hand.
“When you read these things, they only hurt you when you feel they are real, when you believe what you read,” he tells me. “That was where the painful part was.”
“When you read these things, they only hurt you when you feel they are real, when you believe what you read. That’s where the painful part was.”
Typically, a celebrity participates in a documentary when it canonizes their legacy. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so deliberately involved in a project that detects their failures, including raw recordings of drunken drunks, seeking advice from doctors’ mental health, and more than once through the playful light of to look death door swung ajar.
“To believe in myself and prove myself, it was to pursue it that way.” Besides, he says, those documentaries are famously boring as hell. Who enjoyed it, or even took some of it?
“I think a lot more people have feelings of self-doubt or insecurity or anxiety and depression than a lot of people talk about,” he says. ‘That I did not really worry about judging. I wanted to reveal myself and open myself up. You do it so that someone else who is going through the same thing does not feel alone. ‘
It is striking that the whole tribe of Arquette shows up for him in the film. Interwoven amidst scenes of the star putting his life on the line for an argument ridiculous pipe dream of returning to wrestling, her support speaks volumes. It’s his famous family. They are his children. It’s even his ex-wife.
‘We met Scream 1. We hate each other Scream 2. We are married to Scream 3. And we are divorced Writing 4, ‘Cox jokes about their relationship.
Thinking of what it was like when he first wrestled with wrestling, to the confusion of almost everyone in his life, she admits that he at least went full circle: ‘He looked like he should have been on earth, Wind & Fire but instead he went to wrestling matches. And he was so loud. It was kind of embarrassing. There was nothing small about the way he embraced wrestling. ‘
If I ask whether a memorable Friends arc was inspired by this chapter of her life, in which Cox’s character went on Friends, Monica, is disturbed by her friend, played by Jon Favreau, decides he wants to become a wrestler, Arquette does the “Arquette” – that thing you can already imagine by just hearing his name, where he his head down shakes an inverted parabola, cries out loud, runs his hand through his hair, and then looks at you with a streak of grin on his face.
‘It’s notorious that they did it all the time Friends, they would take goods out of everyone’s lives and kind of weave somewhere, whether with that character or with others, ”he says.
In You can not kill David Arquette, the current wife, host and producer of actor Christina McLarty Arquette, puts into context why this apparent hair is actually so existentially important. “As interesting as wrestling is, he feels like crossing over to that world caused many directors not to take him seriously,” she says.
She also has a fantastic monologue, which sorts his entire career on, or at least where his career apparently went from.
‘In the late’ 90s, he was on the cover of the Hollywood edition of Vanity Fair with that elite group of movie stars, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey and Will Smith, ”she says. ‘Those guys have become the biggest movie stars in the world. I think David has a lot of sadness about the fact that he could have been that. But instead he went on to do the Scream movies and he was typecast as the goofball. That’s what everyone remembers when the cop came out Scream. It was also around this time in his life that things became strange. I think his involvement in wrestling was that last straw. People did not get it. They thought he was crazy, and it really hurt his career. ”
Arquette acknowledges that while everything she says is uncertain, its inclusion as an exposure in the film is in the pursuit of a clean narrative from a producer. The real story is much more complicated than that, especially when it comes to a person who is an addict and who never followed a career “strategy.”
“There are so many more things that have caused the derailment, such as drinking,” he says. “I probably should not have done a string of ads. I would always just choose what I want. A lot of the time, it’s what jobs I get. That people I don’t think really knew where I needed to place myself or take myself seriously like this or that. People often do not take comic actors seriously. ”
When you participate in a movie that bears your name and also the word ‘kill’, it invites thoughts about your own mortality.
The climax of the film takes place during a death match in which Arquette proves himself inexplicably in the ring, but ends up suffering the injuries that he is rushed to the hospital. A shard of glass hit his neck dangerously close to his carotid artery.
Looking back now, feelings about life or death are only heightened. It was Arquette’s best friend Luke Perry who was at that game and who took him to the hospital. Weeks later, Perry died. Arquette’s last match in You can not kill David Arquette is known to Perry’s son, Jack, in the ring as “Jungle Boy.” (You try not to cry when you see it.)
“After the death match, my wife was like, ‘I just feel like you want to die,'” he says. ‘I was like no, I do not want to die. But that feeling is inside me. The feeling that this is so difficult, the feeling that you do not want to go on and hit yourself so much that it essentially personifies you by almost killing yourself. ”
But that’s why he made this film.
‘There is a lot of behavior that I had to kind of come to and understand why I did them. There was a lot of trauma that I needed to deal with all these problems that I had been struggling with for so long and to understand and sort through.
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