We show that being a general fibre of a Mori fibre space is a rather restrictive condition for a Fano variety. More specifically, we obtain two criteria (one sufficient and one necessary) for a Q-factorial Fano variety with terminal singularities to be realised as a fibre of a Mori fibre space, which turn into a characterisation in the rigid case. We apply our criteria to figure out this property up to dimension three and on rational homogeneous spaces. The smooth toric case is studied and an interesting connection with K-semistability is also investigated.