Grappling with fame: David Arquette's bizarre rebirth as a pro wrestler

In terms of cinematic output, David Arquette hasn’t enjoyed the most successful career. After promising beginnings, when he appeared on the cover of the Vanity fair Hollywood edition alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith, his profile has been fading steadily for the last two decades. In 2001 he appeared opposite a dog in See Spot Run. In 2004 he billed below DMX in Never Die Alone. Since 2018, the majority of his films haven’t even managed to earn their own Wikipedia pages.

There are many potential explanations for this. Bad decisions, sobriety struggles, the fickle nature of the Hollywood machine. However, a new documentary claims a different reason for Arquette’s unfulfilled potential: professional wrestling.

In You Cannot Kill David Arquette, which would have debuted at SXSW earlier this year and will soon be streaming on the Documentary Plus platform, those close to Arquette mourn the promise of a film career that was lost as his enthusiasm for wrestling grew. His former wife, Courteney Cox, says: “It was a lot to handle to see David at this point … He was going to wrestling matches and he was loud, and it was kind of insane. I remember feeling embarrassed.”

The love of wrestling came from a role he accepted, in 2000’s Ready to Rumble, a hapless would-be wrestling satire in which Arquette – playing a sewage worker named Gordie Boggs – becomes involved with several real-life WCW wrestlers. The film was a commercial disaster, making back just half of its meagre budget, but became one of the most important in Arquette’s career.

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To promote the film, WCW struck on the idea not only of introducing Arquette to its roster, but of crowning him as its world champion. The move was a misjudgment, ruining his reputation in both film and wrestling circles. It apparently weighed so heavily on Arquette’s mind that in 2018, in his late 40s and having recently had a heart attack, he became an actual wrestler on the independent circuit. He trained with a professional trainer. He took part in real matches. He cut his neck so badly during one fight that he had to be rushed to hospital for an operation. This surprise career turn forms the basis of You Cannot Kill David Arquette.

In interviews, Arquette has expressed desire that Hollywood see the documentary and look on him with renewed interest, just as it did Mickey Rourke after he made The Wrestler. But The Wrestler was fiction; this is real. It’s hard to see how Hollywood producers will watch Arquette lying in a ring with blood gushing from his neck and see him as a natural contender to play, say, a Marvel hero.

Whatever happens, it’s heartening to see a star like Arquette work this hard to regain his credibility after a flop on the scale of Ready to Rumble. Val Kilmer didn’t become an astronaut after Red Planet underperformed. Geena Davis didn’t take to the high seas when Cutthroat Island sank without trace. Minnie Driver didn’t train as a qualified meteorologist to make up for Hard Rain’s dry reception. But David Arquette is made of sterner stuff. Let’s just be grateful that Scream was a hit, because he seems like he’d be a terrible police officer.