Stories about directors and producers acting a certain way on set with the cast to set the right mood or induce the perfect performance are a dime a dozen. They are also very popular, if only because they shed light on the moviemaking process.
This Friday, June 25, the highly-anticipated and long-delayed Fast 9 movie finally arrives in theaters. Vin Diesel, the leading man and producer for the franchise, has been drumming it up for most of 2021, but few of the things he’s said so far are this likely to spark industry-wide interest like his taking credit for Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs performance.
Fast and Furious is not just one of Hollywood’s most lucrative franchises and Diesel’s biggest vehicle to fame, but also one of the most influential (and popular) car movies of all time. Within the community of car enthusiasts, it has cult status, and with this kind of attention comes incredible pressure.
Pressure to deliver the perfect performance was what Diesel felt when he (as producer) brought Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on board as Luke Hobbs in 2011’s Fast Five. Audience expectations of Johnson did not match what Diesel had in mind for the character, which he’d envisioned to clash with that fictional universe he’d been part of for so long. So, he resorted to “tough love” to get Johnson to deliver, Diesel explains in his new interview with Men’s Health.
“It was a lot of tough love to assist in getting that performance where it needed to be. As a producer to say, Okay, 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 says. “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.”
Johnson went on to resume the Hobbs character in four more Fast and Furious movies, including the spinoff, but he’s not in Fast 9. In 2016, he and Diesel were feuding publicly, trading jabs on social media amid reports that the FF movie set had grown too small for the egos of both. The two were able to put the feud to rest eventually or, at the very least, stop with the public spats. Diesel seems to be hinting now that this tough-love approach may have started it.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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