The Wrestler Rises Again in You Cannot Kill David Arquette

It wasn’t fair. On April 6, 2000, actor David Arquette became World Championship Wrestling World Heavyweight Champion and, in doing so, the most hated man in the squared circle.

It was supposed to be a way to promote his new wrestling comedy, Ready to Rumble, but it backfired horribly. The film tanked, WCW folded a year later due to a cavalcade of lousy business and creative decisions, and Arquette’s name became a joke in pro wrestling – the Hollywood star who had no business getting in the ring.

Yet that was never his plan. “I always wanted to train and be good,” said Arquette, “but there just wasn’t enough time, so they never let me do anything. I don’t know whether they didn’t want me getting injured, or they just didn’t want somebody getting hurt by me.”

It was a moment that has haunted him forever. He recalled, “IHOP changed their name to International House of Burgers, and someone said, ‘That’s a worse idea than making David Arquette WCW champion.’ This is 18 years later! I can’t be the butt of the joke for the rest of my life!”

So almost two decades after the win that shocked the world, Arquette sought redemption by getting back in the ring. Not as the star of Scream and Eight Legged Freaks, but as a rookie wrestler who was prepared to get battered and bloodied, train in warehouses with Mexican luchadores, fight in backyards and on street corners, and earn the respect of the crowd that hated him in WCW. New documentary You Cannot Kill David Arquette, out this weekend from Neon's new boutique label Super LTD, catches every drop of sweat and blood on the path to earning the one thing he wanted from the industry: respect.

Wrestling is built on respect. It’s an outsider art, where a handshake means everything, and fly-on-the-wall documentary isn’t just about the actor breaking what he called “a preconceived notion of who I was.”

It’s also a deep dive into the modern world of professional wrestling. David Darg, who co-directed the film with Price James, said, “I already loved David but didn’t know much about wrestling. … I always saw it as this very outlandish world and never considered that there might be an indie world or how deep the subculture ran.”

As they followed Arquette, he added, “We started to see how real this world was, especially on the indie circuit – how passionate the fans were, how passionate the wrestlers were. … It’s like beautiful Shakespeare for the working class.”

It was also a sharp learning curve for Arquette, who had to become as immersed in the culture as he became technically proficient in the ring. When he started his comeback, he said, “I didn’t know that backyard wrestling was considered garbage wrestling. I didn’t know the difference between a death match and a hardcore match.” Yet he is, and remains, an eager student. “You learn every time you go in the ring. It’s part of the game.”

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Austin Chronicle: Normally the first question I ask a wrestler is, “What was your worst bump?” but we all know that. It was your death match with Nick Gage at Joey Janela’s L.A. Confidential event in 2018, where your neck got cut open by a light tube. You got out of the ring, bleeding heavily, but got back in and finished the match. What was going through your head?

David Arquette: The first thing that went through my head was that I was going to die. I literally thought I was going to die. So I tried to pin him, because I thought he was just going to give me the win, and then when I got out of the ring Luke Perry was there – Jack Perry, Jungle Boy’s, father. I couldn’t see him but I could hear him, and he said, “Davey, it’s Luke.” So I took my hand off the wound and said, “Luke, is it pumping?” I grew up with Luke, we’d known each other since I was 17, and I knew he grew up on a farm and knew about animals. So he said, “It’s not pumping,” so I knew I could go back in.

AC: Luke’s support for Jungle Boy going into wrestling really touched a lot of people in the industry. It’s almost become wrestling lore now, and that night is part of that story.

DA: It was a night that was pretty spectacular for [Jungle Boy’s] career. He’d done a lot of work with [Game Changer Wrestling] in the past and [Pro Wrestling Guerrilla], so I think it was the culmination of timing.

What I’m really grateful for is that it brought me and Luke back together. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and we had a real great dinner together as a family. I owe that to wrestling.

AC: So why jump back into the scene now?

DA: I had always been a casual fan of professional wrestling, jumping back into it here and there. Then I started to see that smaller wrestlers were making a run, and that made it more acceptable in a weird way. Then I started seeing what was going on in the indie scene and I fell back in love with wrestling.

AC: There’s a pivotal moment in the film where you go to Mexico to train, and luchadores take their wrestling very seriously there. It’s like Japan: They don’t think you’re coming at it with the right respect, they will let you know.

David Darg: The guys that he’s wrestling with are actually sanctioned by the government. You can’t just wrestle unless you have an actual license. It’s such a protected cultural respect, and we knew for David to earn respect down there would go a long way. So that’s where that came from.

DA: When I first started, there wasn’t as much backyard wrestling, but it became a big, big thing from when I was wrestling to when I returned. So we set it up that I would start at the bottom and work my way up. We even approached New Japan Pro-Wrestling, but they didn’t want anything to do with it. … So I did the backyard experience, and then when I did the death match I knew it was going to be intense, but I didn’t know how intense. I knew I was going to do light tubes, but I didn’t know they’d use six light tubes taped together at once.

Unless you’re in the ring there are certain things you’re not going to learn. Like, somebody asks, “How’s it [feel] to take a power bomb?” “Oh, it sucks.” Well, in wrestler terms that means it hurts really, really bad, and there’s a chance you could break something. That’s what “sucks” means. But they’re wrestlers. They’re not going to say something hurts, so there are all these levels and degrees of communication that sometimes you miss out on. Then after the match you go, “Oh, that’s what ultraviolence means.”

AC: That’s what people don’t get, that everything about wrestling can hurt. Even just running the ropes – it’s hard.

DA: I broke a couple of ribs in Mexico, and because it was in a weird spot it took me a couple of X-rays to find it. I was like, “What is wrong, this hurts so much,” and they said, “Well, you’ve got these fractured ribs from taking these back bumps.” That was in the lead-up to my match with RJ City, and I couldn’t believe how much pain I was in. You get a whole different relationship to pain. Pain becomes a constant thing you battle.

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You Cannot Kill David Arquette is available now on VOD.