A24
After famously and publicly beefing for a few years, Vin Diesel and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson have seemingly begun to make amends, with Diesel offering Johnson the latest olive branch in the form of praise for his work on The Smashing Machine.
While The Smashing Machine was a major disappointment at the box office and is unlikely to garner him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, it did succeed in reminding everyone — Vin Diesel included, apparently — that The Rock is actually a very talented and layered actor when he wants to be.
Vin Diesel praises The Rock’s performance as Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine
“I wanted to take a moment to talk about The Smashing Machine. What most people don’t realize is that Mark Kerr was one of the first friends I made when I moved from New York to California. We hit it off immediately, and the reason is simple: he is genuinely one of the kindest, most warm-hearted people you will ever meet. He actually trained me for the first XXX, so in a beautiful way, he was there at the beginning of my action career. That’s the kind of friend he’s been from day one,” Diesel wrote on Instagram.
He then turned his attention to the performance of his longtime “frenemy,” The Rock.
“Let me celebrate Dwayne. People don’t understand what it takes to uphold a global perception every single day,” Diesel added. “I remember asking our global family who they’d love to see me work with, and a woman named Jan left a comment saying her dream was for me to collaborate with Dwayne. What followed became one of the most dynamic pairings in cinema, two strong personalities who pushed each other and created something unforgettable. When he stepped into Hobbs, he did it with full commitment and left an indelible mark on Universal’s character hall of fame.”
“Mark Kerr is so deserving of this moment… and Dwayne really did it… He brought us back in time and shined doing it,” he concluded his post.
The Smashing Machine saw The Rock team with director Benny Safdie, who he’s set to reunite with for another role outside of his usual wheelhouse in an adaptation of the children’s book Lizard Music.
While The Rock has been able to expand his career outside of the action genre in recent years, Diesel has not. He evens seems to be having difficulty getting Fast 11 off the ground, as reports from October indicate that the film currently has no release date and could even be cancelled outright.
In the upcoming Lizard Music film, for which Johnson lost a significant amount of weight for, the Hollywood heavyweight will star as “the quirky septuagenarian Chicken Man.”
In the story, which was written by Daniel Pinkwater and published in 1976, a boy who discovers a secret late-night broadcast of music-playing lizards and meets the Chicken Man and his 111-year-old chicken friend Claudia as he seeks the truth.
Johnson is also attached to a Hawaii-set Martin Scorsese project alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Emily Blunt.