Thursday, June 21, 2001

Keep your eye out for Vin Diesel. He's a man on the move, and not just because he's doing his supersonic thing in one of those speedy cars revving up in The Fast and the Furious. A muscle-bound hunk with a name to distinctly match his movie, Diesel slowed down for just a bit to tell all to PlanetHollywood.com about the accompanying thrills and dangers of drag racing in The Fast and the Furious. Diesel, who will also be showing up soon in Diablo and Knockaround Guys and is rumored to be up for Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, dropped hints about his follow-up to the movie that first made everybody pay attention, Pitch Black.

PLANET HOLLYWOOD: What are you up to in The Fast and the Furious?

VIN DIESEL: I play this character Dominic. He's the kind of guy who feels he has to be tough. It's how he survives, and how he protects his turf and the people around him that he cares about. So he's also got this side of him that is very sensitive, like towards his sister, who is played by Jordana Brewster. And this is a world and a culture in The Fast and the Furious that you haven't seen much of in movies before.

PH: How much were those fast cars a factor in you going for this movie?

VD: Speed and cars, that's always been something that has excited me. Especially when I was younger and crazier, I'd do stuff like that with cars myself. So I love the idea of speed, and that feeling of freedom it gives you.

PH: What was the scariest moment for you in The Fast and the Furious?

VD: It was when I was going like seventy miles an hour in this Civic. I was leaning all the way out of the car window, trying to reach over to another actor who was hanging on to a semi. And if I would have turned even a fraction of the steering wheel, I could have ran right into him. Like I should have just said, let's get that stunt guy in here.

PH: Close call. Your career has been moving along at quite a fast and furious rate too. What does that high speed rise to stardom feel like?

VD: It feels amazing, it just completely blows my mind. There are times when I'm simply in awe about how lucky I've been. It's like when something feels so good, you almost hesitate to feel too good about it. But the struggle you have to go through to come this far, pretty much balances it all out in the end.

Like the time I went out to California when I was twenty one, and thought that my New York credentials would be my ticket. I came back home a year later, all bummed out and feeling like a total failure. But I got through it all by taking other people's advice, you know, to just enjoy the process.

PH: What's the down side of fast-forward celebrity?

VD: Your private life pretty much disappears. People want to know everything about you all the time. If you're being watched like that, you have to be so careful about everything you do. And when you lose that privacy, that mystery you have with the characters you play also disappears.

You know, the less audiences know about you as a person, the more they can get lost in the character you're playing, and believe in your character. People don't know too much about who I am right now, and I'd like to keep it that way as much as possible.

PH: So I guess that means you're not going to be saying much today about that girlfriend of yours, Playboy playmate Summer Altice.

VD: You won't be getting any answers from me about that. But ask me all you want.

PH: Okay, how about that name of yours?

VD: Let's put it this way. It's not on the birth certificate. And that's all I'm gonna say.

PH: I get the idea. How did you find yourself in the world of show business?

VD: For me it's been like almost forever. I've been acting since I was seven years old. And it started out in a really strange way. I grew up in New York, and me and my friends snuck into this old theater there one day. We started tearing up the place.

We were caught. But instead of calling the police, this woman who caught us gave us a script to learn, and twenty dollars a week to be in some plays. I guess she was impressed by our talents!

After that, I just kind of fell into doing off Broadway. It gave me a lot of experience, but not much money. I remember saying to myself when I was eighteen, I'm making it by the time I'm twenty one, or I'm gonna forget about it.

Then when I was nineteen, I started getting jobs as bouncers in different clubs. That's something I just fell into naturally, because I seemed to have the right look and build for it. You know, I looked really imposing and tough.

So I never had a problem getting jobs like that. It was really the only work suitable for me then. And people fear you and respect you when you're a bouncer. So who knows, it may have helped in case I ever play a superhero! Plus, I had no aptitude for being a waiter like other actors, I'm totally uncoordinated! But being a bouncer is a really dangerous occupation. I had a friend who was shot on the job, and another was cut with a razor blade.

So I didn't want to be doing that for too long. But now it's like those days weren't for nothing, because they've asked me to come up with a movie about those years that I was a bouncer, and star in it too.

PH: How did you go from bouncing to acting in movies?

VD: Well, I would always keep auditioning during the day, when I wasn't working. And then I'd also take acting classes, and I'd just dream all the time about getting into movies one day. I also was writing a couple of films, Strays and Multi-Racial. I did everything, the producing and acting too. They made the rounds of festivals, including Sundance. And the right people fortunately got to see them.

After Steven Spielberg saw Multi-Facial, he wrote the character of Private Carparzo into Saving Private Ryan, for me to play. I didn't last too long in the movie, my character dies right away. But Hollywood did get a glimpse of Vin Diesel. Then Pitch Black and Boiler Room came along. Amazingly, both opened on the same day.

PH: Are you excited about those plans in the works for a Pitch Black sequel?

VD: I'm ready. Since the Pitch Black DVD came out, everybody wants to see my character Riddick up there on the screen again. I'm training right now for Pitch Black 2. David Hayter, who wrote X-Men, is writing the sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick. So I think Riddick is going places, I see that guy as like the Conan of the future. Who knows, maybe an Indiana Jones.

Interview by PlanetHollywood.com Special Correspondent Prairie Miller