The legendary 2001 movie Vin Diesel “wanted to be a part of” at any cost: “Whether it was as a producer, director, actor”
Remember when Vin Diesel used to make real movies? It’s OK if you don’t, because it’s been a while.
The last time the man who hates any form of apparel with sleeves starred in something that wasn’t a big-budget studio blockbuster was in 2016, when he starred in Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, not that many people remember, because hardly anybody saw it.
Before that, you’d have to go back another ten years to Sidney Lumet’s biographical courtroom drama, Find Me Guilty, where the chrome-domed action star donned a wig and packed on the pounds to play the real-life mobster Jackie DiNorscio, and it’s probably the best dramatic performance of his career.
That’s two dramas in 20 years, with Diesel epitomising the safety of one’s comfort zone. When you look at his list of credits over the last two decades, it makes for dizzying reading, mostly because he’s either reprising a role or playing a role for the first time that he’s hoping to reprise in the future.
In fact, let’s run through them, shall we? Since Find Me Guilty was released, his filmography reads as thus: sequel, Babylon AD, sequel, sequel, sequel, Guardians of the Galaxy, sequel, The Last Witch Hunter, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, Bloodshot, sequel, sequel, and sequel. Next up? The final Fast & Furious and another Riddick, which are, of course, both sequels.
This is the guy who impressed Steven fucking Spielberg so much by creating, writing, directing, and producing Multi-Facial and Strays in the 1990s that he had a role written specifically for him in Saving Private Ryan, but since The Fast and the Furious and Pitch Black debuted, he’s done fuck all else, really.
However, had he gotten his way, he may have never played Dominic Toretto once, never mind a dozen times. He only got the gig because Timothy Olyphant turned it down, but Diesel had his eyes set on a significantly more monumental 2001 release instead: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
“I wanted Aragorn,” he revealed in February 2000. “But the point is, I wanted to be a part of that, whether it was a producer, director, actor.” Peter Jackson felt differently, but that opens the door to several hilarious alternate possibilities for how the seminal trilogy of JRR Tolkien adaptations could have turned out.
If anything, it’s hard to decide which is funnier: Vin Diesel playing Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, or Vin Diesel directing Lord of the Rings, in which he’d probably have cast himself as Aragorn anyway. Either outcome would have changed the course of 21st-century cinema, and definitely not for the best.
