Vin Diesel, the actor Michael Caine called his surrogate child: “This is my son!”
Michael Caine has never exactly run with the crowd. On his 90th birthday, he marked the occasion not with a quiet drink or a family dinner, but by dining with Tom Cruise, David Walliams, and Denise Welch—a trio that feels like the result of a PR raffle rather than a friendship circle. Still, Caine’s never played by the usual celebrity rules. In fact, he’s so close to one of Hollywood’s biggest modern action stars that he’s gone as far as calling him a surrogate son.
According to Caine, he first met this musclebound, chrome-domed action superstar three decades ago at a dinner party. At this point, the guy was a million miles away from the top of the Hollywood mountain, but there was something about him that Caine instantly connected to.
“I just instinctively greeted him with a hug and announced to the whole room, ‘This is my son!'” Caine revealed in his memoir Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over. “Sometimes, you sense a connection. I just liked the guy immediately. He has a big heart.”
At the time, Caine discovered that the struggling young actor was going through a tough period in his life, and he believes the kindness of a screen legend like himself went some way to soothing his tortured soul. “I think perhaps it made an impression upon him to be embraced and treated with love,” Caine mused. “Anyway, we’ve been great friends ever since.”
Fascinatingly, it took until 2015 for Caine and this monosyllabic man-mountain to work together onscreen, and it came in the form of the (mostly unfairly) maligned supernatural action flick, The Last Witch Hunter. Yes, that’s right, the A-lister Caine considers to be his unofficial son is The Fast and the Furious star Vin Diesel.
“My grandchildren, Taylor, Allegra, and Miles loved that film,” Caine wrote about The Last Witch Hunter. “Vin really speaks to the younger generation. He’s a real star and multi-talented. A fine producer who also writes scripts and gets deeply involved in the concept of his movies.”
Despite only working together once, Caine revealed he and Diesel still meet up any chance they get. Caine and his wife Shakira invite Diesel and his wife Paloma Jimenez for dinner anytime they’re in town, or sometimes they just get together for a catch-up on everything that’s been going on in their busy lives.
Naturally, Diesel admitted that he has tried for a long time to convince Caine to star in the Fast and Furious franchise. When asked on a red carpet about which famous face he’d want to welcome into the universe next, his immediate answer was, “Personally, I would just love to have my mate Michael Caine be a part”. Sadly, that wasn’t to be, and Caine retired from acting in 2023.
However, a laughing Diesel revealed that when he first contacted Caine about joining him in The Last Witch Hunter, the ageing star was already worried that his ‘son’ was about to float the prospect of speeding cars and death-defying stunts. “When I finally got this project and called him, he thought I was calling him to be in Fast and Furious,” Diesel chuckled. “So, his first response was, ‘I don’t even drive anymore! How are you gonna ask me to do Fast and Furious?!'”
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