The Next Action Hero

By Jess Cagle

For the past decade, Hollywood has been desperately trying to pump some testosterone into the lucrative but enervated action genre. With Stallone and Schwarzenegger approaching 60, the studios have actually taught skinny guys like Keanu Reeves and Tobey Maguire how to fight. They've even taken the drastic measure of coming up with some really interesting action ideas, like The Matrix.

But Hollywood sees an unlikely savior on the horizon: Vin Diesel. Tough, stoic and tawny, with muscles like Adonis and a voice so deep only Bea Arthur can imitate it, Diesel became a star last summer in the surprise street-racing hit The Fast and the Furious. At the moment in Hollywood, Diesel is the very model of the new action hero.

Although their parents may not have heard of him, members of the hip-hop generation have embraced Diesel so enthusiastically that his per-picture fee is rapidly rising into the $20 million territory. Teens are so excited about seeing him in XXX, a spy movie opening Aug. 9, you have to wonder if they think the title refers to something besides extreme sports. Like The Rock, whose Scorpion King grossed more than $90 million earlier this year, Diesel is also part of a nascent constellation of stars whose melting-pot backgrounds and features seem to be resonating deeply with young moviegoers of all colors. Hollywood has seen the future of the action hero, and it's multiethnic.

With his exotic looks--olive skin and full lips--he's widely assumed to be of Italian and African heritage, but Diesel resolutely refrains from identifying his ethnicity. One Race is the name of his production company, and he refers to himself simply as "multicultural." "I support the idea of being multicultural primarily for all the invisible kids, the ones who don't fit into one ethnic category and then find themselves lost in some limbo," says Diesel, 35, as he dips into a bowl of hummus on the patio of Los Angeles' gothic Chateau Marmont hotel.

In XXX--a high-camp, high-concept, highly stylized adrenaline rush of a movie--Diesel stars as Xander Cage, the ripped and tattooed un-James Bond. Like Diesel himself, who admits that when he was a child his "appetite for attention was insatiable," Xander is a self-starting, self-promoting charmer who is presumably unfit for any occupation other than star. Obsessed with dangerous exploits that require extreme athleticism, Xander sells black-market films of himself performing such stunts as stealing the Corvette of a right-wing Senator, driving it off a cliff and parachuting to safety. He's recruited by a U.S. security official (a scar-faced Samuel L. Jackson) to save the world from an East European anarchist.

In preview screenings, men cheer the stunts (see Vin outpace an avalanche on a snowboard!) while young women whoop and holler every time Diesel reveals his tattooed chest--which is frequently. The film explicitly sets up Diesel as the new postmodern Bond by killing off a nameless spy wearing a tux in the first scene. A sequel is already in the works.

"In the past, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were the face of America," says Santiago Pozo, CEO of Arenas Entertainment, which caters to the Latin market in the U.S. "Today it's The Rock or Vin Diesel." The irony is this: the guy formerly known as Mark Vincent spent most of his life feeling like an ethnic misfit, even on his home turf in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Diesel, who has a twin brother with blond hair and blue eyes, discovered the theater through his stepdad, an acting coach whom he still idolizes. (Diesel never knew his biological father.) Starting at age 5, he felt most at home onstage. "I found that there was something refreshing about having my identity be crystal clear [playing] a role," he says. Acting jobs were hard to come by, so the 6-ft. 1-in. Diesel, who had been pumping iron since he was a teenager, became a star bouncer at Manhattan clubs in the 1980s. "The name Vin Diesel came out of the bouncing thing," he says. "We all had nicknames. It was a wonderful thing to detach a little bit."

In the early 1990s, he began writing, directing and starring in his own tiny-budget films. Multi-facial, his 20-min. short about an actor constantly slipping into the cracks between black and white roles, played at Cannes in 1995. Steven Spielberg saw the movie and gave Diesel his first break as the ill-fated Private Adrian Caparzo in 1998's Saving Private Ryan. But Diesel was still trying to find his place in Hollywood. Already familiar with the transvestites of Manhattan's club world, he lobbied for the part of a smart-mouthed drag queen in the 1999 drama Flawless, opposite Robert De Niro. Director Joel Schumacher turned Diesel down because of the actor's massive physique--a liability that he would eventually turn into an asset in the action genre. "A transvestite spends her life trying to look as feminine as possible, and I have lived a different way," says Diesel. "I have obviously spent my life celebrating my masculinity."

As a crooked Wall Street hustler in Boiler Room and a sci-fi psychopath in Pitch Black (both released in 2000), he proved that there was some acting talent underneath all that muscle. The roles also established a template for his onscreen persona--the bigger-than-life tough guy with a soft center. Unlike Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Diesel comes with a disarming streak of vulnerability. "He's not invincible, and not so handsome as to be off-putting," says Rob Cohen, director of The Fast and the Furious and XXX. "We live in times of tremendous unrest and insecurity, so a guy who says, 'Look, I'm insecure but ultimately I'm going to do the right thing' is both realistic and aspirational."

Offscreen, Diesel is a born diva: magnetic, magnanimous, tempestuous. His entourage often includes outsize pals from his bouncer days. The fantasy of being a superstar is a kind of pornography to him, at once titillating and disturbing. "Every year I go on a little trip," he says. "I call it a month of anonymity. I'll go to Europe; I'll go to some happening city. After the city is onto the fact that I'm there, I'll leave and go to some obscure place, and just walk the streets and not worry about anything."

When a group of women descends on a table next to Diesel's on the Chateau Marmont patio, he instinctively puts on his sunglasses. The Irish heartthrob Colin Farrell (Minority Report), who happens to be visiting the hotel, wanders by with a bottle of Corona to say hello. "What are you doing next?" asks Farrell. Diesel explains that he's about to start shooting The Chronicles of Riddick, a sequel to Pitch Black, and he's developing a Braveheart-type historical epic in which he will star as Hannibal, the Carthaginian conqueror. "So you're taking over the world," says Farrell, a bit awed by Diesel's clear-eyed ambition. "That's good, if that's what you want."

Diesel, in fact, does want.

"Yeah," he says, leaning forward, "it is nice."

--With reporting by Heather Won Tesoriero/New York

With reporting by Heather Won Tesoriero/New York