VIN DIESEL | A MULTI-FACED WEAPONRY OF THE HEART S-News

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Vin Diesel might be the dudeliest dude in contemporary cinema. And if there by some chance is a dudelier dude, I guarantee, said archetype of man has appeared in at least one of the franchises Diesel stars in. Hell, the two of them have probably punched each other in the face on film.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. When you read up on Vin Diesel, descriptions of his craft as an actor are buried under lavish descriptions of the most salient features of his dude-bro man body: Gleaming muscles! Tough-guy shaved head! Voice so deep it ripples, like the tectonic rumbling of a world-destroying asteroid. He is so often defined as Vin Diesel: paragon of masculinity. Which presents a strange seeming contradiction: Vin Diesel’s persona is so hyper-masculinized that the media’s treatment of him goes almost the full 180, nearly landing him the very same treatment that many actresses endure—so preoccupied with the work of the body that they grow incurious about the life of the mind.

I’m not the first person to notice this. Iconic director Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico) made the same point to Diesel when they worked together on 2006’s Find Me Guilty. In a 2017 New York Times interview, Diesel recalls Lumet telling him: “You will suffer what beautiful women have suffered in this industry for 100 years. You will suffer for your action-hero physique.” On the one hand, I don’t know about suffering. Diesel seems to be doing just fine, with two major releases slotted for the first half of 2020. He plays the title character in Bloodshot, Valiant Comics’ first cinematic adaptation, out in March 13; in May, Fast & Furious 9, the tenth installment in the franchise. Diesel stars in and produced both.

Vin Diesel wears D73 blazer and DSQUARED2 jeans

But then again, the comparison is real. I find myself fighting the impulse to ask him every single dumbass question I’ve ever hated a reporter for asking an actress. What’s your workout routine? Do you ever get to eat bagels? Do people underestimate you because of your body? Is it a burden, having worked so hard to create the kind of body that will allow you to thrive in the industry, that people will become fixated on your body they might forget about the person who lives inside it? Seriously, how much do you want a bagel right now, because I can order you one on GrubHub.

Vin Diesel’s body is the unspoken, unavoidable context for our conversation, as it is context for so many of his films. Body as commodity, body as signifier, body as fetish object, body as fitspo, body as multi-billion dollar, multiple-franchise box office draw. And it would be all-too-easy to focus so hard on the trademark tectonic-plate rumble of Diesel’s voice that you miss what he’s actually using it to say, most of which falls well outside the narrowly-defined spectrum we’ve been taught to expect from tough guys and action stars. Over the course of our interview, Diesel shifts between talking like a tenured film professor, interrogating questions of craft and story sense, to espousing sweet mantras from the Fred Rogers school of life coaching. (Though, presumably, Diesel is cardigan-free on the other end of the call.)

“The best version of myself has always been just a pure message of love,” he tells me. “I really, really, really, really, really, really believe that. At my core.” And he as much as anyone seems aware of the complex relationship between physical and emotional strength; that the same physique that invites narrowed expectations simultaneously liberates him from those expectations. “Maybe because I was a bouncer in New York City, I don’t have to front to be tough. And because of that, I have more freedom to be—loving? If that makes any sense?”

It makes every kind of sense.

Vin Diesel wears POLO RALPH LAUREN tank.

Vin Diesel wears AMIRI blazer and CALVIN KLEIN t-shirt.

But here’s my question: What is it, exactly, that we are demanding from the body of Vin Diesel? What’s so important about the voice, the body, the masculinity? With beautiful women, the answer is easy: 𝓈ℯ𝓍. We commodify the body and sell it off, repackaged as a fantasy. But Vin Diesel’s franchises—F&F, Chronicles of Riddick, xXx, almost inevitably Bloodshot—are largely targeted toward viewers who see Diesel and action stars like him not as 𝓈ℯ𝓍 objects, but as…what? A blueprint for masculinity? A how-to guide for existing in the world as a man? A driving instructor? (Please not a driving instructor.)

It’s a fascinating position that Vin Diesel occupies, spending two decades in a career in which his biggest box office successes have focused on qualities of traditional masculinity at a moment when we, as a culture, are recognizing that the traditional archetypes of masculinity don’t necessarily work—for women or for men. We see it everywhere. Suicide rates are higher for men, in part due to the stigma about reaching out for mental health. Toxic masculinity leads to social isolation, men struggling to maintain emotionally intimate friendships with other men after late adolescence. There is a paucity of spaces for men to be deeply vulnerable and forge connections with other men. There’s a cry for a new blueprint, and that staunch bastion of hypermasculinity, the action flick, is a ripe venue for this evolution.

Case in point, Vin Diesel’s upcoming feature, Bloodshot, an adaptation of the beloved early ’90s Valiant Comics title (Valiant’s first release into the saturated superhero cinematic complex). Within the first minute of the trailer, half of Diesel’s face is shot off, and he punches a concrete column to dust with his bare hands. The film’s eponymous character is a literal 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ing machine—a biotech-infused super-soldier with nanites in his blood that allow him to do all the destruction he wills without a single scar or wound. (Kind of the ultimate stoic fantasy, huh?)

Vin Diesel wears POLO RALPH LAUREN tank. AMIRI jacket, BALMAIN jeans, and talent’s own boots.

But this superhero-as-usual action is intercut with sun-soaked memories of the character’s wife (played by Talulah Riley), so sweet they verge on schmaltz: slow dancing, gazing, love as pure and true as a Savage Garden song. Diesel’s character (formerly known as Ray Garrison) remembers the face of his wife’s 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁er and vows revenge—only for the viewer to realize that the 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁er’s face is an implanted false memory, designed to motivate Bloodshot to better serve his masters.

There is an almost operatic tenderness to the trailer, the kind of sweet melancholy that we might expect to see in one or two flashbacks from a movie—but for this level of yearning to be baked into the premise? Diesel says the complexity is part of what drew him to the concept. “The Ray Garrison character is kind of a victim of mental programming,” Diesel tells me. “He’s being manipulated by the use—the improper use—of love. A character who is manipulated by his ideals of love. And that’s tragic in every sense, right? That somebody would use your heart to create a 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁er.”

Bloodshot’s powers don’t even come up in Diesel’s description of the movie. A superhero defined not by his super-ness, not by his heroism, but by his motivations and his emotional life. “And that’s kind of what’s so tender about the movie,” Diesel notes. “You actually feel sorry for this character. The empathy that the character evokes while simultaneously having superhero-like powers creates a very interesting dynamic. To play a character who both evokes empathy and evokes fear simultaneously was very challenging.” It seems like an important distinction that he draws: the difference between being a hero and merely having superhero powers. I ask him to expand on this idea, whether evoking empathy is in some way at odds with heroism? He points to the increasing desire for complexity, for heroic characters who subvert stereotypes. “I think it’s not enough to whitewash superheroes anymore,” he reflects. “Even just being flawed isn’t enough. Now we’re wanting to understand, really to get their motives. Watching movies, you realize you’re wanting to come into the story with preconceived ideas and the twist of Bloodshot is that it forces you to take a hard look at yourself, in a way.”

Vin Diesel wears POLO RALPH LAUREN tank. DSQUARED2 jeans and talent’s own underwear.

And beyond indicting the viewer for their own narrow assumptions about heroism, about masculinity, Bloodshot holds up a mirror to a few of the most prominent crises of contemporary masculinity. “It’s a film that speaks to the quintessential soldier or soldier’s plight. Maybe that’s why this character’s been the military’s favorite superhero, because they so identify with going out and being a machine, then come back and feel discarded or unappreciated,” offers Diesel. “There’s an element of post-traumatic stress in the DNA of this character.”

If the superhero genre is growing to demand more emotional nuance and interrogation of archetypes, then Vin Diesel is an ideal vector for this growth. He’s been doing the work of maturing and emotionally complicating the Iconic Action Hero in the Fast & Furious franchise since 2001. The saga has grown in every conceivable way. Starting as a street-racing love letter to Point Break, everything about the movies has gotten bigger. The stakes of the plots have escalated from stealing a truckload of combo TV/VCRs to saving the world from cyberterrorists. The films’ constellation of stars is ever growing, including Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, and—in Fast 9—Helen friggin’ Mirren. The stunt sequences have yet to meet a rule of physics that they don’t want to throat-punch with sublime ludicrousness.

Vin Diesel wears POLO RALPH LAUREN tank. GOOPIMADE jacket and pants and WILLIAM HENRY bracelets.

But while the films have intensified as objects of escapist pleasure, so, too, has their heart been growing. Diesel speaks to inhabiting his F&F character, Dom Toretto, for the better part of two decades. “After Fast 4, I started to realize that as the studio was asking me to continue the saga, there’s never been a chapter in any acting book that talks about the evolution of a character over a decade,” he reflects, suggesting, “How different that is, to monitor a character’s progression over a decade, and how much to incorporate your own evolution.” Advertisement Advertisement

And the evolution seems to center around the idea of love. The affordances that the character has gained, as a result of both his age and the era, to develop authentic and loving relationships with those around him. “Quite frankly, Dom Toretto in his initial films didn’t have the liberty to be as quote-unquote ‘lead with love’ that I do.” But of course, there’s a bind. “There are times when I speak my truth, when I try to encourage the world to be just love,” adds Diesel. “And then I go, ‘Ugh, is that Riddick enough for the Riddick audience?’” Quite the balancing act, to be authentic as an action star during a transitional moment in masculinity: to fulfill the demands of the die-hard genre audience and to create stories that are entertaining as vehicles for spectacle (and for literal, often exploding, vehicles)—while simultaneously underpinning those stories with explorations of relationships which model that it’s okay for men to sometimes feel big feelings, even if they’re uncomfortable with them.

Vin Diesel wears POLO RALPH LAUREN tank. SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO top, PURPLE jeans, talent’s own boots, and WILLIAM HENRY bracelets.

And as the F&F franchise enters its second decade, those big feelings are starting to center around a subject close to Diesel’s heart: fatherhood. The parallels between

Toretto’s life and Diesel’s own? “Too many to count.” But one of the largest is the question of fatherhood: Toretto is a new father, but Diesel has three kids of his own—all three of whom were 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 during the filming of a F&F film. “Whereas for the last ten years F&F has been synonymous with an exploration of brotherhood,” Diesel explains, “we’re now launching into #fatherhood, and what that means, and how that would speak to our world. And to come this far and to expand on that, into the project of fatherhood, is very timely. In many ways, what the world needs is a reconciliation with the father archetype. And hopefully, Fast 9 does something to serve that reconciliation with our world’s relationship with, and understanding of, the father archetype.”

Diesel’s famously open social media presence is a curated celebration of #fatherhood. (No, seriously. He uses that hashtag at least once a week, along with the similarly love-y: #FamilyOverEverything #LeadWithLove #GlobalFamily #ProudFather and, inexplicably, #DadBod.) And, as much as I’m trying to avoid all of those dumb questions people ask actresses, I have to ask him the most obvious one: how do you balance your career with being an invested parent? “My 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren are very present in the process,” he says. “In all kinds of ways—in good ways and bad ways. If I’m doing a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous stunt, I come home, drop to my knees, and hug my 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren.”

But there are upsides, too. Emotions from the home sphere make their way onto the screen, sometimes in very literal ways. Diesel tells me, palpable #ProudFather in his voice, that a powerful line from the upcoming Fast 9 was written by his daughter. He doesn’t reveal the line (presumably to avoid spoilers), but he is an ebullient hype man. “The one line that you [will] remember—the one that [will make] you cry—was literally written by my 4-year-old daughter in real life,” he confides. Diesel pauses, and even over the phone, I can hear him closing his eyes, playing the line in his head. “Blows your mind. Of course, she didn’t realize she was going to become the author of this iconic line,” he says. “She was organic with it. You’re going to be blown away.”

Vin Diesel wears D73 jacket.

She’s not the only writer in the family.

Long before Diesel was redefining roles and interrogating archetypes as an actor and producer, he made his own roles “by necessity,” he emphasizes. Like his characters, his career itself is testament to the value of constant evolution. Diesel grew up in New York, raised in artist housing with a theatre producer father. “I’m really lucky that I had such a rich upbringing,” he reminisces, “that I had street but I also had bohemian in the house. I had cerebral and artistic. I grew up in this melting pot.” He started acting at 7 and moved to California at 18, “thinking that every door would fly open.” But the doors remained locked, because—to butcher some Whitman—Diesel was too large and contained too many multitudes. “I entered this industry before multiculturalism existed or the concept of multiculturalism was kind of allowed in the cinematic universe,” he says. “I wasn’t getting many roles because I was too multicultural.”

After a year without landing an agent, he moved back to New York and resumed working as a bouncer, realizing roles didn’t exist for him, so he’d have to forge them himself. He studied directing and writing, and bent those s𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁s to his first major project. “I created a short film called Multi-Facial that essentially speaks to all the naysayers and validated why they couldn’t cast me,” Diesel shares. “I created a whole short film that says, ‘This is why you can’t cast Vin Diesel.’” The film went to Cannes, and his next film, the feature-length Strays, was selected for Sundance in 1995. It seemed like a clear path stretching to the horizon. “I was under the impression I was just going to be an auteur,” Diesel adds. “Jon Favreau was the year after me at Sundance and somebody compared our two films. And we were two directors! We’d made the same number of movies.”

Vin Diesel wears FENDI sweatshirt.

But Spielberg wrote a role for Diesel into Saving Private Ryan, and Diesel was, as he put it, “whisked away” into the embrace of studio franchises. I ask if the new decade will bring us a return of Vin Diesel qua auteur, and he pauses just long enough for me to realize that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have asked the question. (Subtle, silent admonishment? Chalk one up for #fatherhood.) He then brightens and tells me, “Whenever I catch up with Steven Spielberg, he’ll always say to me, ‘You know, Vin, I hired you as an actor in Saving Private Ryan, but I always expected you to continue directing.’ And if my mom is there—we’re both the kind of people that take our moms to events—he’ll say it to her, and it’s always a shock. Oh my god, you think I’ve dropped the ball because I haven’t been directing.”

His dream project—the one he says his whole filmography is building toward—is a trilogy about the life of Carthaginian General, Hannibal Barca. While he makes no promises for this decade, he admits, “It reminds me of the time I went to a coffee shop. The guy gave me coffee and said, ‘Oh my god, you’re Vin Diesel. That must be so cool! You must wake up every day saying, I’m Vin Diesel!’ And I told him, ‘No, I wake up every day saying, I have not directed the Hannibal Barca trilogy yet. Failure.’”

Vin Diesel wears POLO RALPH LAUREN tank.

And, yeah, that’s one way to define himself. Vin Diesel: once (and future) director. There’s also Vin Diesel: thespian, auteur, film nerd. Vin Diesel: #FamilyAboveAll man who brings his mom to events and is psyched to brag about his daughter’s writing prowess. Vin Diesel: former bouncer who could probably punch a train off its tracks. Vin Diesel: secular Instagram proselytizer for love. Vin Diesel: proud feeler of big feelings. The list could go on for quite a while before you got back to Vin Diesel: he of the gleaming muscles and thunderous voice—Vin Diesel: Action Star.

And in this cultural moment of defining masculinity, of testing its elasticity, pushing back against its constraints, fighting for spaces for expression, connections, and intimacy, it’s beautiful to see an action hero who is not merely shirtless, but actually exposed. Who is sentimental and vulnerable in ways that are not contradictory to his masculinity, but rather a part of that masculinity. You can crash cars into all the helicopters you want, I tell him, but that doesn’t take as much courage as truly connecting to someone. “Are we afraid of looking weak? Are we afraid of looking over-sentimental?” he chuckles, ruefully. “It’s not what we’re taught in the street, that’s for sure. But you try to create something that hopefully has some value after you’re gone.”