The Vin Diesel role almost played by Steven Seagal: “He saved me from a fate worse than death”
It’s very important when you’re making something to use the correct tool for the job. You’re not going to be able to produce a particularly good meringue if you don’t have a whisk. You’re going to struggle to restart someone’s heart effectively without a defibrillator.
And similarly, if you’re making an action movie that feels like it should be set in the early 2000s with a burly shaven-headed growly-voiced main hero, you’re going to need a Vin Diesel.
Now to give Diesel his due, he didn’t just drop into the Fast and Furious franchise fully formed (there’s some alliteration for you) but in fact put in the hard yards very early on, his desperation to make movies leading him from working as a bouncer in a New York nightclub to self-funding a debut film that he wrote, directed, produced and starred in, 1994’s Multi-facial about a struggling mixed-race actor.
That did well enough to get some attention at Cannes and a viewing from none other than Steven Spielberg, who thought Diesel was effective enough to cast him in 1998’s war epic Saving Private Ryan, albeit in a fairly small role. But Diesel was on his way nonetheless. His next big role wasn’t one that needed him to use his burly frame; however, he provided the voice for the Ted Hughes animated film The Iron Giant the following year, which initially performed poorly but has since gone down as something of a classic.
His breakthrough came in 2000 as he won the part of Riddick in the space-set sci-fi horror Pitch Black that wasn’t expected to do huge numbers at the box office despite a reasonably meaty budget. It belied those expectations, however, pulling in more than double its expenditure and making a star of its leading man. But it was very nearly a completely different story, had casting gone with an alternative actor as the film’s director, David Twohy reveals.
According to Twoh,y the plan was to hire ageing ponytailed action star Steven Seagal for the role of Riddick, something the man in charge put paid to as soon as possible. He told Yahoo Movies: “I fought hammer and tongs to make that not happen, even though somebody along the line had promised [Seagal] the role… (It was) very important because he (Diesel) saved me from a fate worse than death… I had to unwind all that nonsense. Then once I won that battle, it was like ‘okay motherf***er, who are you gonna cast?’.”
Luckily for Twohy, the right man was indeed available in the shape of Diesel, who was known to be a considerably less spiky character than Seagal and much easier to work with, especially as the shoot was scheduled to take place in the outback of Australia for weeks at a time.
Twohy added: “Vin came along at just about the right time. He read in the room and he wasn’t great, because that is not his gift — reading in a room, off a page. He really wants to inhabit a role. But by the time we brought back our lead candidates, Vin was off-book and you could tell he was the right choice at that point.”
Luckily for all concerned, things panned out as well as anyone could have imagined, apart from for Seagal, obviously. Pitch Black went on to spawn two sequels, 2004’s Chronicles of Riddick and 2013’s Riddick and Diesel used the sleeper hit to propel himself into the Fast and Furious movies and the ‘Bond on steroids’ XXX films.
He’s now one of the highest-grossing actors in history, bringing in almost $12bn in box office revenue, and is currently working on the next instalments of all three of those mega-franchises, with new XXX, Riddick and Fast & Furious movies all currently in different states of production.
