David Arquette Needs to Talk to Mickey Rourke (and Possibly the Rock)

By Kate Hudson | Celebrity | November 17, 2018 |

By Kate Hudson | Celebrity | November 17, 2018 |

It takes all kinds of people to make up this country we call America. Some enjoy deep frying junk food and selling it at state fairs, much to our collective delight. Some come up with over-priced household items that I drunkenly buy late at night after my Uber drops me off, because it seems like a great idea at the time and yet never, truly, is. Finally, some will take a punch for a living, because it’s Friday and they rented out a hipster bar in the Highland Park neighborhood of LA—like I said, it takes all kinds.

Warning: basically everything I’ve linked to below has gnarly, bloody pictures, so click through at your own risk my friends. Yes, even the twitter account, nothing is safe.

Last night David Arquette thought it was a great idea to enter into a “wrestling Deathmatch.” If you just involuntarily shuddered like I did—congratulations, you now know you’re not that kind of person. David Arquette, apparently, is. He wrestled with a professional wrestler with a lot more experience under his belt, who by all accounts wasn’t in the 1996 slasher-flick classic Scream like Arquette was. The guy he fought is named “Nick FN Gage” whose twitter bio is: “real twitter for The King aka The GOD of Ultraviolence - H8 Club - MDK - GCW” I don’t know what basically any of that means, but I know I would be terrified to enter into a wrestling ring with him—especially because you’re allowed to break stuff over the other person’s head. You know how I know that? It happened to Arquette last night.

I know Wikipedia isn’t the best source, but a walk down Gage’s profile there is the stuff of nightmares if you’re thinking of fighting him in a “Deathmatch” (yup, that’s what it’s called!) Not only was he professionally trained to be a wrestler, he’s been doing it for almost 20 years. As far as I can tell, Arquette has not (hold that thought). Additionally, Gage was sentenced to prison for 5 years for robbery—this is only relevant because this is a man who probably picked up a few moves in prison, or saw some sh*t, and again, Arquette willingly fought him.

TMZ is a garbage site, but I’m going to link to their description of what happened last night just to demonstrate how bad of an idea this was for Arquette—there are bloody pics at the link, you’ve been warned.

The actor-turned-wrestler was up against Nick FN Gage and it was just brutal. Gage broke a light tube over Arquette’s head. You see David grab his neck as blood pours from the area. Shockingly, the fight continues.

Toward the end, it looks like David gives up, climbing out of the ring, but then the 47-year-old hops back in as he bleeds profusely. Gage stomps on him, but David fires back by smacking Gage with a chair. It didn’t take long … David gets pinned.

After the match, David told his fans he needed a few stitches and he was fine.

Look—Arquette isn’t in uncharted waters here—he’s dabbled in wrestling since he was in that movie with Scott Caan, Ready to Rumble…but here’s the deal: he’s only been training with a professional wrestling coach since this year:

I never really got the opportunity to wrestle, so just 18 years later, after a lot of people gave me grief, I was like, ‘I want to do it right,’ so I’ve been training with Peter Avalon, a great wrestler/trainer. I’m getting back into [pro] wrestling 18 years later.

…and he thought it was a good idea to enter into a “DEATHMATCH” (put in caps, because that is a terrifying name for anything) with a dude whose been fighting in Deathmatches for years. Whyyyyy?!

Arquette has been making movies for almost 30 years, I can’t help but feel that he should have talked to other actors who know the toil professional fighting like this has on your body, and possibly the impact it can have on your career in Hollywood because someone is breaking sh*t on your face, my good man (One of his acting projects on IMDB is listed as filming, and he’s got another in pre-production atm.) Let’s not forget Mickey Rourke stepped away from his acting career in the early ’90s to go box professionally—something that he gave up again a few years later after his body was broken and his face reorganized. Not for nothing, but Rourke had 8 matches and was undefeated—which probably has something to do with the fact that before he became an actor, he was an amateur boxer. Arquette, as far as I can tell, does not have any experience wrestling until 2000, and again, didn’t begin training professionally in earnest until earlier this year.

If Rourke wasn’t available—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson might have been. Or John Cena, or Ronda Rousey, or Gina Carano, or hell, even Jean-Claude Van Damme. They’d probably have told Arquette the physical toll wrestling/fighting takes on your body, and how much they had to train for their fighting/wrestling careers, and how there’s a very good reason why they’ve turned to acting over sports, because again, it can wreck your body and damage your face—but at this point, it sounds like Arquette was committed to this Deathmatch. I don’t know, the whole situation sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me, but like I said at the beginning of this, it takes all kinds of people to make up this wacky world of ours.