Vin Diesel sent the entertainment-news cycle into overdrive last week with his revelation that the next two installments of the Fast and Furious franchise — let’s call them Fas10 and Furious 11 — will pull the emergency brake once and for all on the 20-year-old, $5.4-billion-grossing hot-rod saga.
This, of course, won’t be the first time the 53-year-old action hero, born Mark Vincent Sinclair, will have walked away from the series.
With the last franchise off-ramp approaching quickly, the long-gestated F9 takes Fast’s core fixation with family — a word that Vulture’s David Edelstein once noted is uttered “approximately 682 times” in Fast and Furious 6 — in radical new directions.
And on the heels of Diesel’s surprisingly infectious September EDM single “Feel Like I Do,” the multi-hyphenate discussed his musical output, which has included recording with Steve Aoki and a mysterious artist he refers to as “Nicki M”: “I would love to do an album,” Diesel says.
When the announcement came that it was your idea to make Fast 11 the last Fast and Furious movie, it made me wonder, Is Vin bored of playing Dom Toretto? In 2009, you talked to me about working with Sidney Lumet in Find Me Guilty and how you really got a lot out of that experience in terms of shattering your typecast.
But in terms of this mythology, I think we owe it to the fans — even though I suspect it’ll feel bittersweet to a lot of people — to give them the finale.
From what I understand, this film largely came about because you called Justin out of the blue to discuss Dom’s evolution as a character.
Obviously, he was a stoic that didn’t feel confident about bringing life into the world and probably didn’t have a lot of confidence in society overall, which is why he maintained his tribe and was very much about his family and didn’t branch out away from that.
The second I was a producer, I didn’t waste a second and called Paul and said, “You’ve got to be in Fast Four.” He said, “I walked away from the franchise.” I said, “I’m producing.” And he says, “I’m in.” I think the Toretto story line that they’ve wanted to do can always exist in the future.
And in this film, it turns out his dad is ethnically ambiguous, too.
I think you, as the audience, are going to learn more as the story continues — just about the specifics of the past, primarily with my father.
We had thought that when Dom told Brian that he had a love-hate relationship with that car in the garage in the first one, we thought it was only related to the loss of his father.
That was one of the positives to the pandemic preventing me from being on-set.
But while I was there, I saw Rihanna and Mikky Ekko perform a song called “Stay.” And I remember my daughter was 5 at the time and we were going to get a Valentine’s Day present for her mother — my queen — and we went and got a microphone and a little speaker.
The fact that you’re not a professionally trained singer.” And I remember being in London and I told Paul Walker that everyone really freaked out at me for singing the song and posting it.
Chris, I think something that you alluded to in the beginning conversation speaks … You talked about, “Do you want to do other things?” What you’re implying is what’s real.