Driving Range

Firstly, let’s deal with the preconceptions – which, sadly, are kind of inevitable when you meet an actor like Vin Diesel. His bulked-up frame and shaven head tend to place him, however unfairly, alongside The Rock and Jason Statham in the ranks of box-office-busting leading men of excellent cardio but modest thespian talent. His most conspicuous films, like xXx, are typically testosterone-fuelled actioneers where the explosions are more well-rounded than any of the characters, and the contrived one-liners drip with all the frequency of a James Bond parody. He is to cinematic arts, you might conclude, what the WWE is to professional sport.

Yet, to dismiss Vin Diesel is to fail to read much further than the first line of his CV. The adopted son of a drama teacher and an astrologist, who was raised in an artists’ project in 1970s Greenwich Village, Mark Sinclair Vincent first appeared on stage as a precocious 7-year-old, having been apprehended with his brother as he was breaking into a local theatre, and where he was given a script instead of a reprimand. He became obsessed with acting and remained involved in the Jane Street Theatre throughout his childhood, until he began screenwriting while at New York’s Hunter College.

Having changed his name to Vin Diesel – a contraction of his real surname plus his nickname, which was bestowed because of his ceaseless energy while working as a nightclub doorman – he began to write, direct and produce his own films. Multi-Facial, a documentary about his own trials as a young mixed-race actor going for audition after audition, was selected for screening at the 1995 Cannes Festival and earned him a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. He followed that with Strays, on which he did pretty much everything, including financing it through his evening job as a telemarketer. It was selected for competition at the 1997 Sundance Festival.

Okay, so then came the blockbusters. But he’d more than paid his dues by the time The Fast and The Furious and the aforementioned xXx came around, including acclaimed voice-over work on the animation The Iron Giant. And so fed up was he of battling for roles for which he was either “not black enough” or, conversely, “not white enough”, he formed his own film production company One Race Films and then a studio for game development called Tigon, named after the hybrid between a tiger and a lion.

And even when the big bucks started to pour in, he refused to reprise his roles in either film – until, seven years on, he felt he had earned enough Hollywood respect to return to Dominic Toretto for the fourth instalment of the The Fast and The Furious series, called simply Fast and Furious. In the meantime, he starred in the Sidney Lumet-directed courtroom farce, Find Me Guilty, in which Diesel – in a wig and 30 extra pounds that made him look a little like James Kahn – hammed it up as real-life mobster Jackie DiNorscio. He was, according to the doyen of critics Roger Ebert, “a good choice for this role, bringing it sincerity without nobility.” Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune purred that he was a “bankable name honing his craft”.

That seems to have been his maxim throughout his career. Now 42 and father to one-year-old Hania with his 27-year-old model girlfriend Paloma Jimenez, he has long believed in his privacy and his commitment to hard work – whether during his nine years as a nightclub bouncer or in his desire to make his own movies. “My training [as a bouncer] was not to talk loosely,” he says. “That’s still my thought process: Shut your mouth, watch your back and keep working ’til your ass falls off.”

For now, though, the work is making his latest outing as Dominic Toretto as compelling and successful as his previous ones. With a production budget of $105 million, a cast list that again includes former girlfriend Michelle Rodriguez, and a storyline that manages to include a Dodge Charger, a BMW M5, a Subaru Impreza WRX, a Nissan 240SX and a Ford GT40 – among others – it’s a long way from the days when he scoured Rick Schmidt’s book Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices.

For the full interview with Vin Diesel where he explains his return to the Fast and Furious franchise, see NOX 33