This wasn’t a whim but something that had been percolating since his first foray into the sport in 2000, on the back of the buddy comedy Ready to Rumble, ended in a publicity stunt that saw him declared WCW World Heavyweight Champion. Arquette, who’d loved watching wrestling growing up, thought it was a bad idea, and so it proved. Fans were so affronted by a Hollywood celebrity taking the title in such ridiculous fashion that for almost 20 years, whenever he went to watch a match, he’d be spat on.
Tired of the abuse, and still feeling guilty over unintentionally disrespecting something he adored, You Cannot Kill David Arquette charts the actor’s bruising bid to “prove to myself and the wrestling world that I’m at least tough enough to be a part of it.”
It is astonishing, sometimes shocking viewing. For example, at the beginning of his journey, Arquette declares that he likes to have fun and playfully enters the ring in a dubious backyard contest doing some Andy Kaufmanesque clowning, only to exit it later covered in his own blood, after being smashed over the head with fluorescent tubes and body-slammed on to drawing pins. He could have quit. Instead, he embarks on a dogged mission to transform himself into a wrestler for real.
Along the way, the film honestly and intimately details Arquette’s struggles with alcohol and emotional issues that appear to have been forged in a childhood coloured by a mother’s violence. Physical exercise has helped him deal with “anxiety and depression, tremendously,” he says. So, it seems, has talking.
Although he admits to occasionally doubting whether being open about his problems is a good idea, Arquette says: “When I grew up, I never liked secrets. I never liked people putting on facades. I like when people are real and honest and vulnerable, so I try to be that way. Also, I think there’s a lot of people right now that are going through really hard times and suffering, beating themselves up, and not wanting to live, quite frankly. I know that feeling and I know how painful it is. I also know you can get through it.”
Given his heart attack, there is something suicidal about Arquette’s search for redemption in the film. The risks seem huge, especially when his neck is badly cut by glass during a “deathmatch” involving weapons that goes wrong —“I thought I was dying. It was a scary situation. I was in over my head” — resulting in his being rushed to hospital by his friend, the actor Luke Perry, who died unexpectedly the following year.
Arquette had entered the room to boos and, after finishing the bout, despite his gruesome injury, left it to cheers. His wife, however, was worried.
“After the deathmatch, she said, ‘I feel like you want to die.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’” But, he says, “there’s a really dangerous thing with people who aren’t afraid to die, or are fearless to a certain extent, or who are beating themselves up, or are in a place where they just don’t care so much. So it’s a little tricky sometimes. Fear is a good quality to have to protect yourself, but if you don’t give a hell about it, it can be dangerous. So I had to come to terms with that and I had to figure out why I was doing this. It’s an ongoing journey.”
The “why” may go back to his mother. In the documentary, his sister Patricia recalls how she’d been choked by her once to the point of unconsciousness. She claims that such behaviour impacted on David, as the youngest, by making him feel like he needed to be the “perfect son”. But, says Patricia, “you can’t fix it by being the best kid in the world.” This might partly explain why Arquette is still trying to find a way of not hyper-critically “beating yourself up for, like, saying something that you didn’t mean to be insulting or upsetting, and then ruminating over it for days, and then seeing the person and they didn’t even take it that way.”
I tell him people like his mother are often in pain themselves, and he reveals that she was indeed herself the victim of abuse. “She had a really horrible childhood and went through some really traumatic experiences.” It was generational: her father was a Russian immigrant who’d been smuggled out of Russia in a rolled up carpet, while her mother was born to a family of Polish descent. “There was a lot of things that they had to deal with in their childhoods, too,” he says.
As adults they also had problems, as illustrated by a story he vaguely remembers about them having a shop in Niagra Falls that was burned down. “The community came together to help them rebuild it, but it was because they were Jewish. They didn’t feel safe, so they ended up moving to Scranton [Pennsylvania]. So I think there’s a lot of pain, trauma, and hatred which just feeds on the worst side of humanity.”
Tearing up, he recalls how his mother eventually broke the chain. “She did hit us as kids and that was intense, but by the end of her life she had become a marriage and family counsellor.” His voice vibrates with emotion as he tells me about her diploma arriving in the post as she lay dying from breast cancer, aged 57. “I said, ‘Mum, it looks like you graduated from life.’ So she’d done this incredible thing. She’d put a stop to the cycle.”
Aged 40, Arquette was in Jerusalem and discovered that he could have a barmitzvah. As a child, he’d been “infused with multi religions”, but had asked his mother for a barmitzvah when a friend had one. She told him he just wanted a party, and dismissed it. “We didn’t have the money, so I think she didn’t want to disappoint me,” he says. Visiting the Western Wall, “I found out that I could, like, do it. It was in a quicker fashion. I didn’t have to memorise the Torah and everything. But I had always connected with the Jewish part of myself. It means the world to me. I love that side of my heritage and honour it. So I did it.”
Years earlier he’d explored a darker part of the Jewish experience playing a member of a Sonderkommando unit in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Tim Blake Nelson’s harrowing 2001 Holocaust film, The Grey Zone. When I ask him what it felt like as a Jew making a film set in a detailed recreation of the death camp’s crematoria, the interview takes an unexpected turn. His “wildest experience”, Arquette says, was shooting a scene with naked Bulgarian extras with shaved heads playing victims of the gas chamber. To give them a semblance of privacy, he’d averted his eyes until the cameras rolled.
“So, I’m looking at the ceiling, it’s really hot, and everyone’s together, and there’s like a smell of people that’s really, like, interesting, and it’s very real and very intense.”
When the director called “action”, he was to bend down and lift up a female corpse. “So,” he says, “I turned to pick her up, and she looks just like my mum! She had the same body shape. And my mum had shaved her head because of the cancer. I’d just lost her and there she was. It was very shocking.”
The memory breaks him and his grief spills out. He takes a deep breath and sighs. “Sorry,” he says. “That was a very emotional experience for me.”
It wasn’t just his recent loss that had affected him but the reverberations of the lives lost in the Holocaust, and in other atrocities since.
“It really is why it’s so important to love yourself and love one another,” he says, reflecting on a deeply divided America. “Try to make the world a better place. Try to learn from your mistakes and be a better person. That’s sort of all you can do.”
‘You Cannot Kill David Arquette’ is released in the UK this week
