Awards shows are a time for celebrities to poke fun at all of the strange stories circling them. Vin Diesel took that to heart, using his time as a presenter at the 2025 Golden Globes to extend an olive branch to his Fast & Furious co-star Dwayne Johnson.
As Diesel took the stage, he looked out to the crowd and spotted Johnson, with whom he has a complicated history. With a smirk on his face, the XXX star said, “Hey, Dwayne.” as the camera cut to the former wrestler, who was donning a smile of his own. It caught a lot of viewers off guard, and social media can’t decide whether this was a publicity stunt or another chapter of the longstanding beef.
Of course, Diesel and Johnson started collaborating when the latter joined the Fast & Furious franchise in Fast Five, which reinvigorated the series and set it on the path to becoming the worldwide sensation it is today. However, behind-the-scenes issues plagued subsequent movies, so much so that Johnson left to do a spinoff, Hobbs & Shaw.
It rubbed some members of the Fast & Furious crew the wrong way, but Johnson never minced words when talking about the situation and his issues with Diesel. “One part of me feels like there’s no way I would dignify any of that bull**it with an answer,” he told Vanity Fair in 2021 after being asked about Diesel saying he had been giving him “tough love” to get better performances out of him. “I’ve been around the block a lot of times. Unlike [Diesel], I did not come from the world of theater.”
Despite shade from both sides, things appeared to calm down after a few years. Johnson even returned to the mainline Fast & Furious movies in Fast X, appearing in a post-credits scene that teased his role in the next film. There were even reports of another Hobbs project being in the works. However, there’s been little news since then, making the moment at the Golden Globes appear more tense than it may have been intended to.
As it tends to be with most celebrity beef, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. It’s entirely possible that Johnson and Diesel will never fully be on the same page or work together again after the Fast & Furious series concludes. Still, they’re both entertainers, and they know that the audience loves a good feud, even if it’s being overblown. That makes it easy for them to play things up when they’re in the same room together.
Unfortunately, this moment between Diesel and Johnson may be all Fast & Furious fans get for some time. The eleventh movie, which is said to be the last, has run into some production snafus, leading to it being delayed until 2026. But when it does finally arrive in theaters, it’s sure to address the cliffhanger from Fast X that left the fate of the Fast Family up in the air.
Published: Jan 6, 2025 09:20 am