You can picture Vin Diesel’s agent at the negotiating table. “We want 20 mill up front, points on the back end, a limo, a Learjet ... and Vin gets to wear a black vest throughout the entire picture.” “But, please — this is a Resto- ration comedy.” “Black vest — or else Vin walks.”
In recent years, Vin Diesel has come to enjoy a special relationship with his singlet. He sported one in the cult sci-fi thriller Pitch Black. He tore round LA in one in the exceedingly loud The Fast and the Furious. Dare we mention saving the world from biological warfare in yet another (or possibly the same) garment in XXX? In his new film, the bombastically titled space fantasy The Chronicles of Riddick, Mr Diesel has his outfit on again, delivering the universe without his label showing once. He’s even wearing one today (technically a T-shirt, due to Dorchester hotel decorum, but doubtless the sleeves shred off with but a twitch of his monumental “delts”).
Yep, that is Vin Diesel: not your mincing “unleaded” or your namby-pamby “four-star”. Vin Diesel doesn’t drive a 4WD on the school run; no, sir, he drives a goddamned Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Actually, in the absence of a Mrs Diesel, there are, as yet, no Dieselettes. The actor’s domestic attentions are currently lavished upon a suitably macho 15-stone mastiff named Roman. Unfortunately, Roman recently decided to clamp his jaws around the scrotum of the screenwriter Michael Kerner, resulting in a $8m (£6.5m) lawsuit. “Well, he was suing the insurance company — it isn’t punitive,” explains Diesel. “This is the kind of dog you have to be introduced to, and he approached the dog and tried to submit it; tried to push his head down. The dog just snapped ... probably was painful.”
Vin Diesel demands ice, and a bucket of it is delivered. He asks for a cigarette and, just as surely, another minion is dispatched. His basso profundo may rival Isaac Hayes’s, but there’s also something quite playful — dare one say, a little bit camp — about him. A man enters bearing a silver cigarette case. “Can I bum a fag?” gurgles Diesel, employing an appalling Dick Van Dyke mockney accent. Considerate, too. Knowing I have never seen his Cannes-wowing 1994 short, Multi-Facial (rather brilliant, it turns out), his calling card as the self-professed “first multicultural movie star”, he rustles round for a DVD. But first Diesel must thump the tub for his new film.
Advertisement
Riddick is a sequel to Pitch Black (2000). That low-budget, Alienesque caper saw Diesel as one of a few crash survivors marooned on a planet of nocturnal carnivores (his character’s speciality being that he could see in the dark). Where the original was a model of economy, the second part has somehow ballooned into a space opera, in which the titular antihero hops around the galaxy fighting armies of necromongers and suchlike, the whole thing apparently set against the backdrop of a Yes album cover — Lord of the Rings to Pitch Black’s Hobbit, as he puts it. “Chronicles of Riddick is the beginning of a tril-ogy. I wanted to follow Riddick off that planet. I wanted him to introduce us to a universe and a mythology,” he gushes. “The elements came from years of playing Dungeons & Dragons.” With a tied-in video game, its appeal to teenage boys is assured. Diesel talks fondly of buying a trampoline to “master the in-air anatomy of Riddick” — which probably tells you all you need to know.
In the film, Diesel mumbles repeatedly about something that sounds like “Queen Victoria” (actually, it turns out, a planet called Crematoria). It had seemed the only way of explaining the presence in the film of Judi Dench. But not so. Diesel, quite improbably, had always had a yen to act with the grande dame.
“For years,” he enthuses. “People would say to me, ‘Who do you want to work with?’, and expect me to say an A-list director or an A-list actor. And I would say, ‘Judi Dench’. She’s the best actor of our time. My mother’s a huge fan.” Diesel went to London to see Dench in a play, then “resorted to the old acts of chivalry”, bombarding her with flowers till she cracked. “When she got to Vancouver (to start shooting), she came in wearing a shirt that said DIESEL in great letters, which I thought was very cute,” he chortles.
Diesel nowadays is in that rare group of actors who can command upward of $20m per picture. Although, on hearing that his studio had consented to Diesel’s purse, one Columbia exec reportedly commented that he “figured somebody must be smoking crack”, the global success of The Fast and the Furious and XXX (his Bond for the extreme-sports generation) speak for themselves. Both were geared up for sequels. “I could have made $100m,” Diesel declares. Realising, however, that with Riddick factored in, it would mean sustaining three franchises, he opted out of 2 Fast 2 Furious and XXX2, engendering no small amount of acrimony. However, he remembered Tom Hanks’s advice: “The hardest thing in the business is to learn how to say no.”
“I’m a poor kid from New York,” he says, “so when somebody’s putting $27.5m on the table for you to do a movie you know will be a hit, it can be challenging.” Still, with another $12.5m trousered for doing Riddick, he can probably still bathe in dollar bills. “I wish,” he replies. Well, his accountant can, then? “Who knows what he’s doing?” Though the rough upbringing is hammed up a little bit (his adoptive father was a theatre director), it is true that Diesel’s eventual arrival in the film world (he is now 37) was born of dogged perseverance. “Al Pacino said, ‘Overnight success is 10 years in the making’. For me, it was more like 20.”
Advertisement
To finance his first feature film, Strays (1997), he toiled in telemarketing, selling light bulbs. For nine years prior to that, he worked as a bouncer, where he assumed his hard-man handle (his given name is Mark Vincent). Daytimes were spent failing auditions, his “handicap”, as he addresses it, being that his mixed blood (part Italian-American, part African-American) did not allow him to fit into stereotypical parts. Thus was born the aforementioned Multi-Facial, which detailed his travails on the casting circuit. “I’m multi- cultural, and I embrace my racial ambiguity,” he declares. “When I was growing up, there weren’t movie stars, icons like me, that I could look up to.” Out of the blue, two years later, his agent received a call from Steven Spielberg, who was sufficiently moved by Multi-Facial to write a part in Saving Private Ryan especially for him (the soldier who tries to rescue a French girl from a bombed building). The rest is history.
Diesel has also tooled around in small straight films such as Knockaround Guys, A Man Apart and (more impressively) Boiler Room, even voicing The Iron Giant, but although he says, “It prevents me from being the guy that has to do action films”, the truth is that it has simply highlighted the success of his black-vest extravaganzas. Yet the term “action hero”, he says, means nothing. “It goes in one ear and out the other.”
He has, he points out, just finished The Pacifier, a Disney comedy. Then there is the possibility of a Guys & Dolls remake, and the prospect of playing the boxer Joe Louis in Spike Lee’s biopic. His big dream, though, is to realise the long-rumoured sword-and-sandals epic Hannibal. “Either I’m ambitious or crazy, because I want to direct it,” he muses. He is, too, about to shoot Find Me Guilty with Sidney Lumet, the master of the courtroom drama. With that, he stands up and raises his top.
A shockingly middle-aged belly flops over his belt. “I’m supposed to be building a gut,” he says. Maybe that’s why the black vest has figured so prominently ... and why he never takes the damned thing off.
Advertisement
The Chronicles of Riddick opens on Friday
Don’t miss the trailer for The Chronicles of Riddick on August’s The Month CD-Rom