Welcome to Beef Week! Over the next few days, The Ringer will continue its retrospective exploration of the past 25 years by delving into one of the quarter century’s defining features: delightfully petty feuds.
We might as well start with the pipe wrench. The past 25 years have given us plenty of celebrity beefs; this scene from Fast Five, in which Vin Diesel nearly bashes in the Rock's skull with a piece of heavy-duty plumbing equipment, may be the only time two rival parties in such a beef have been filmed beating the shit out of each other in an illicit Brazilian garage. Call it a thesis statement.
The fact that Diesel and the Rock can't stand each other in real life is one of the essential components—one of the high-performance racing tires, if you will—of latter-day Fast & Furious lore. Technically, of course, what we're watching in the scene above is a brawl between two fictional characters, Diesel's drag-racing, crime-ring patriarch Dominic Toretto and Rock's Luke Hobbs, the federal agent sent to bring in Toretto’s gang. But the Fast franchise has always derived a large percentage of its emotional weight from the way its on- and off-screen narratives intersect. It matters, both to the series and to the fandom around it, that Diesel and Paul Walker, his original costar, were friends; it matters that real-life grief over Walker's death found its way into the franchise's farewell to his character, Brian O'Conner. (More on this in a minute.) Fast Five came out in 2011, but since 2016, when word of the rift between Diesel and Rock started to circulate, it's been impossible to watch the fight scene without reading the actors' feelings into it. Celebrity gossip is the hit of nitrous that kicks the engine into hyperspace.
I'll talk about the genesis and timeline of the feud in a bit. First, let's take a second to appreciate this fight. It's not a marvel of action choreography so much as a marvel of intensely contrasting vibes. Dwayne Johnson, as the Rock is known on his birth certificate, was a WWE star before he went to Hollywood, and there's something wrestling-adjacent about the exaggerated personas of the two men, which seem even more exaggerated when they're next to each other (or throwing each other through walls, as the case may be). They're both bald, enormous, and unapologetic; beyond that, they might as well be from different solar systems.
In one corner, we've got Diesel as Dom Toretto: dark, glowering, wounded, hunted—someone who's made mistakes and knows it, someone who's been betrayed. Dom has seen things, terrible things, and he's done things, too, not because he likes doing them but because his moral code requires it. He'll do anything for his family. (In the fight scene, Dom is losing until he catches a glimpse of his friends, at which point he receives a pro wrestling–like burst of super-strength.) In his younger days, after his father was killed by another driver's actions in a race, Dom beat the other driver half to death with a pipe wrench, which makes his refusal to do the same to Hobbs a sign of growth rather than surrender. He didn't go looking for Hobbs, but he throws the first punch when Hobbs comes calling. He won't back down, ever, but he's living with two tons on his conscience.
In the other corner, there's Johnson as Luke Hobbs, the unstoppable force to Diesel's immovable object. Hobbs is the pursuer. He's confident, positive, practical, and useful. He's not reflective or haunted by the past; he has a job to do and he likes doing it. Where Diesel seems empathetic but not nice, the Rock seems nice but not empathetic. Where Dom has seen the limitations of all human institutions except “family,” Hobbs trusts the government, whose laws he helps enforce. He fits in, despite being twice the size of everyone else in the room. He's a professional, not some kind of broody poet. Diesel, in real life, fantasizes about being a dark elf named Melkor. Johnson fantasizes about being president.
Dom Toretto says things like: “I live my life a quarter-mile at a time.” … “We have eternity in this moment.” … “I choose to make my own fate.” … “You never turn your back on family.”
Luke Hobbs says things like: “If you keep runnin' your pie-hole, you're gonna smell an ass-kickin'.”
The contrast couldn't be more perfect, which is why the fight feels so elemental. At the plot level, the Fast franchise may be a goofy cartoon, but the characters embody real, incompatible worldviews, not least because the actors take them so seriously. And so it felt at least semi-destined when, in August 2016, word leaked that Diesel and Johnson had been feuding on the set of Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in the series. Well, word didn't exactly "leak" so much as the Rock posted word directly on his Instagram page. The post is now deleted, but in it, Johnson praised his female costars in the Fast-verse, while calling out unnamed male costars: "Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don't." The ones who don't, he said, are "too chicken s--- to do anything about it anyway," because, he added, they are "candy asses." Was he talking about Diesel? He was. You refrain from murdering a man with a wrench and this is how he thanks you!
In the following weeks and months, with the literal fate of the Furious seemingly hanging in the balance, our large adult protagonists tried to reconcile, holding a highly publicized secret meeting to squash their beef, while also, like all people who sincerely want to make up, releasing damning attacks on each other via unnamed media surrogates. "Sources close to the production"—meaning close to Diesel, who's a producer and basically the showrunner of the franchise—alleged that the Rock was frequently late to shoots, and that tension had been building for months as a result. Other sources alleged other things, as sources will. The result? The two actors decided they could no longer work together. Even men with 500 pounds of biceps between them can be incapacitated by that comparatively tiny muscle, the human heart.
Over the next few years, the stars continued sniping at each other in the press. Diesel talked the most and said the weirdest stuff. In 2021, he attributed the beef to the "tough love" he'd shown Johnson while shooting, supposedly to coax a better performance out of him. "It was a tough character to embody, the Hobbs character," he told Men's Health. (Note: It is not at all obvious to me, a non-actor, that the Hobbs character was at all tough to embody, or that the Hobbs character was even different in any meaningful way from the Rock himself, but that's why I don't make movies.) "I could give a lot of tough love," Diesel said. "Not Felliniesque, but I would do anything I'd have to do in order to get performances in anything I'm producing.”
The Rock's formal response to this assertion, issued via a cover story in Vanity Fair? "When I read that, just like everybody else, I laughed. I laughed hard. We all laughed. And somewhere," he added, in a line that's probably the closest thing the feud has to a real-life pipe wrench, "I'm sure Fellini is laughing too."
As film history goes, "Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson can't make Fast movies together anymore" isn't exactly RKO sabotaging an Orson Welles masterpiece while Welles was out of the country, but it's not nothing, either. The Rock was the most bankable movie star in the world for much of the 2010s, and the Fast saga is currently the eighth highest-grossing series in film history. This was a schism that fundamentally reshaped one of the biggest properties in Hollywood. It caused a major realignment of the franchise, with Diesel re-emerging as the indispensable cast member in the core series and Johnson branching off to star with Jason Statham in the in-universe side quest Hobbs & Shaw.
It's thanks to Hobbs & Shaw, by the way, that the series that gave us 2 Fast 2 Furious has reached a new peak of numerical absurdity. Do the math on this one: The forthcoming Fast X: Part 2 will technically be the 12th film in the franchise.
Beef Comes Fast and Sometimes Furious
I've always had a huge soft spot for the Fast saga. And yes, that's partly because I like watching Diesel and Walker jump a $3.4 million Lykan HyperSport supercar across multiple skyscrapers in Dubai's Etihad Towers complex while rogue black-ops assassin Deckard Shaw bombards them with rifle-propelled grenades. And sure, it's partly because I enjoy concepts like "a super-weapon known only as Nightshade" and "an infamous cyber-terrorist called Cipher" and "rogue blacks-ops assassin Deckard Shaw is suddenly all about protecting a baby named Brian, and is honestly really sweet to Brian in the process." But partly, I think it's because the Fast saga has always had a strange emotional gravity underneath its cornball plots, and that emotional gravity is what makes the Diesel-Rock feud feel simultaneously painful and appropriate.
After all, what's the overriding theme of the Fast franchise? It's family, right? Both biological and chosen. Every installment in the series' post–Tokyo Drift era hammers this point home. You never turn your back on family. … I don't have friends, I have family. Dom is the father figure of the ad hoc family whose adventures the saga chronicles. And because the characters are continually defined as a family, those of us who like the franchise wind up viewing the cast through that lens, so that the stars' tribulations feel like echoes of real-life family drama. And those echoes bleed into the films. After Walker died in a car accident in 2013, the ending of Furious 7 depicted Brian driving away on a different road from Dom; the moment emotionally acknowledged the tragedy without letting it fully into the movie. It was a lovely moment in its own strange way, and the underlying feeling it represented—a feeling that the Toretto clan’s familial bonds somehow extend to all of us—helps give the franchise a dignity you wouldn’t expect from a story that’s also about driving muscle cars on the tops of submarines.
Well, death is something every family has to deal with. You know what else every family has to deal with? Weird uncles who can’t be in the same room together! Every family has turmoil that sometimes threatens to swamp holiday logistics, and that’s why—as fun as it is to watch Johnson and Diesel share the screen—the actors’ conflict arguably deepens the Fast saga more than it diminishes it. Families fight, families make up, and families ultimately appear in surprise mid-credits cameos years after walking away from the whole franchise. We are all living our lives a quarter-mile at a time, and I say this as someone who will probably never drive a Pontiac in space: The Fast & Furious family is all of us.
