Following the release of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw has this week an article has appeared online at The Wall Street Journal (Subscription Required) which looks at the franchise’s three leading men’s (Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham) attitudes towards their characters being portrayed as weak onscreen
All three apparently go to great lengths to avoid looking weak on-screen. Apparently, Statham has a studio agreement in place that limits just how badly his character can be beaten up, whilst Johnson enlists producers, editors and the fight coordinators to ensure: “he always gives as good as he gets”.
Vin Diesel allegedly has his younger sister police the number of punches he can take throughout a fight sequence, he reportedly cared so much about who landed more blows during a scene that he assigned numerical values to each move throughout a fight to make sure Dominic Toretto looked tough enough on-screen.
It gets even sillier as one report over a scene in 2017’s The Fate of the Furious, alledges that Johnson asked not to be filmed laying at Diesel’s feet as the script required Johnson, instead he insisted his character should be sitting up.
The tough-guy arms race appears to have spilled over into the actor’s offscreen lives as well. Johnson shocked fans in 2016 when he wrote an Instagram post calling his male co-stars “candy asses”.
“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,” Johnson wrote.
He later admitted the insult was intended for Diesel.
Apparently, though the franchise’s male stars are bigger divas than their female counterparts, as the girl-on-girl fight scenes such as those between Michelle Rodriguez and Ronda Rousey in The Fate of the Furious don’t worry about such ‘scorekeeping’.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw is in cinemas now