How Paul Walker Helped Vin Diesel Get Cast in ‘The Fast and the Furious’
Vin Diesel was officially cast in the Fast and Furious franchise after Paul Walker was already recruited. Fortunately for Diesel, both Walker and their Fast director saw something in him in Diesel’s first major film role.
Paul Walker first saw Vin Diesel in ‘Saving Private Ryan’
Diesel wasn’t yet a big star when Fast and Furious was first thought of. Steven Spielberg cast Diesel in the actor’s first major feature Saving Private Ryan. Diesel ended up on Spielberg’s radar thanks to the short film Multi Facial, which Diesel wrote and directed himself. According to a 2018 interview Diesel did with the LA Times, Spielberg wanted to meet him personally after seeing the project.
“He asked me to meet him on the set of Amistad ” Diesel remembered. “And I remember thinking, ‘How should I look?’ He’s writing a role for me based on my being a director, so what do I do here? And what was I going to say to him? I promised myself I wouldn’t say something he’s probably heard a thousand times, like, ‘I’m a big fan of your work.’ And, lo and behold, I get in front of him and he says, ‘I’m a fan of your work,’ and I say, ‘I’m such a fan of your work.’”
Diesel found a lot more work after collaborating with Spielberg in the feature. But Saving Private Ryan was also directly responsible for him getting The Fast and the Furious. Speaking with Deseret News, Walker revealed that another actor was first in mind to play Dominic Toretto.
“Do you know who they wanted for Vin’s role? Timothy Olyphant. He passed on it. He didn’t like it,” Walker said. “Then Rob Cohen [the director] asked me if I had seen Saving Private Ryan. That’s when we first saw Vin.”
Vin Diesel and Paul Walker both brought the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise back to life
Diesel and Walker briefly parted ways with the Fast franchise. Diesel left after the first movie, as he was skeptical about making Fast and Furious sequels. Walker would star in one more sequel before also exiting the series. Neither were in the third film Tokyo Drift, which didn’t screen too well. According to Walker, the franchise nearly went straight-to-DVD after Tokyo Drift’s disappointing performance.
“The thing that’s pretty crazy is that neither Vin nor I were going back to do the third one. They were going to do a direct-to-video 4. They were going to dispose it and be done with it. But then, Vin was like, ‘No, I’ll come in for a cameo,’ because it wasn’t testing well. He wanted to set up the fourth one and the studio went for it, and we got a second life. It was supposed to be done already,” Walker once told Collider.
After Diesel and Walker’s return in 2009’s Fast and Furious, the franchise became bigger than ever.
Why Timothy Olyphant rejected Vin Diesel’s starring role in ‘The Fast and the Furious’
Fast and Furious further established Diesel as an A-lister, and helped increase his net worth significantly. But things might’ve turned out differently if Olyphant took the role. In an interview with Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Olyphant shared why he didn’t take to the action thriller.
“I just thought, well, this will just be stupid, and I thought no one is gonna wanna see this movie eight or nine different times,” Olyphant said. “I mean, by the third or fourth sequel, people are gonna definitely get bored of it. Right?”
But given that Olyphant led a successful career in his own right, he harbored no regrets passing on the franchise.
