Vin Diesel sat down with Men’s Health to discuss his career, and perhaps inevitably, his former feud with Fast & Furious costar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson came up. The 53-year-old is a producer on the franchise, and when Johnson joined, he had definite opinions about how it should go, he revealed.
He said: “It was a tough character to embody, the Hobbs character. My approach at the time was a lot of tough love to assist in getting that performance where it needed to be. As a producer to say, ‘OK, we’re going to take Dwayne Johnson, who’s associated with wrestling, and we’re going to force this cinematic world, audience members, to regard his character as someone that they don’t know’ — Hobbs hits you like a ton of bricks.”
Diesel said of the tough conversations: “That took a lot of work. We had to get there and sometimes, at that time, I could give a lot of tough love. Not Felliniesque, but I would do anything I’d have to do in order to get performances in anything I’m producing.”
Reports of their conflict emerged in 2016, when they were filming the eighth film. The Rock posted a Gram about some people on set who “conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don’t.”
He added, “When you watch this movie next April and it seems like I’m not acting in some of these scenes and my blood is legit boiling — you’re right.”
Two years later, Johnson made it clear that they’d sorted things out. He told Rolling Stone: ” I came to realize is that we have a fundamental difference in philosophies on how we approach moviemaking and collaborating. It took me some time, but I’m grateful for that clarify. Whether we work together again or not.”
F9 is out June 25th.
