Fast and Furious has unexpectedly become a behemoth of a franchise over the past decade or so. They continue to find ways of defying the laws of physics with their action scenes, the cars have become even flashier, and the cast continues to get bigger with the addition of several A-list stars like Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.
With so much money and star power on one movie set, you’d think that a lot of ego massaging would be going on to appease all those A-listers, particularly the male leads.
And you’d be completely right actually because it turns out that Fast and Furious is less of a movie and more a haven of toxic masculinity courtesy of Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the making of the last few Fast and Furious movies essentially consisted of trying to not make either Diesel, Johnson or Statham look, ahem, weak.
In fact, the trio’s respective egos were so fragile that each had a ridiculous agreement that limits how many punches they can take during a fight scene, though this was later abandoned because it just caused unnecessary headaches for the poor film crew.
“According to producers and crew members on the films, Mr. Statham, 51 years old, negotiated an agreement with the studio that limits how badly he can be beaten up on screen.
“Mr. Diesel, 52, has his younger sister, a producer on the films, police the number of punches he takes. And Mr. Johnson, 47, enlists producers, editors and fight coordinators to help make sure he always gives as good as he gets.“
Diesel sounded particularly sensitive to all the male energy that was happening on the Fast and Furious set, so much so that his sister Samantha Vincent, who is a producer on the films, weighed in on fight scenes and rehearsals to make sure her bro got to “get his licks back in.”
That only scratches the surface of this protein-heavy saga as this level of dick-swinging went above and beyond onscreen fisticuffs. Statham reportedly liked to stop by the editing room to give his input on the fight scenes (i.e twisting the editor’s arm to make him look better).
If you think this is all pathetic and ridiculous, you’d be correct but you also haven’t heard the worst of it yet.
According to a crew member working on The Fate of the Furious, there was a scene that required Johnson to be lying on the ground at Diesel’s feet. Apparently this was too much for Johnson’s fragile ego to handle and he insisted that his character should “at least be sitting up.”
Guess that explains where scenes like this came from.
While all the men were worried over who looks the best, the women were didn’t really give a crap about this sort of “scorekeeping” and were, you know, adults about the whole thing.
It’s all pretty pathetic and speaks volumes about why we must quash this toxic masculinity thing once and for all. Then again, should we have expected anything more from three hyper-masculine bros who are in reality nothing more than “candy asses“?
Definitely not.