Only Chris Morgan’s therapist can answer the question as to whether the screenwriter’s inspiration for Fast 8 (2017)—in which Dom and Hobbs once again become mortal enemies—was, on a not-so-subconscious level, mined from the real-life tensions between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson.
In one way, having Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s lawman Luke Hobbs team up with the abandoned and betrayed crew of Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto after the career criminal goes rogue was a neat flip on Fast Five’s (2011) original dynamic, which introduced Hobbs as the family’s aggressor. But anyone even tangentially following the franchise’s off-screen drama could see how art was starting to mirror life, however intentional or not. And while Fast 8 ultimately and rather tidily resolves the animosity between Dom and Hobbs, the real feud between Hollywood’s two biggest slabs of blockbuster beef was far from over.
Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that Diesel and Johnson do not share a single second of screentime throughout Fast 8. Even in the few scenes in which Dom and Hobbs technically occupy the same physical space—such as the Berlin-set extraction sequence or the “zombie car” chase through Manhattan—the two men’s visages never appear in the same frame. This was no accident. After spending years putting up with Diesel’s onset antics—with the star regularly showing up hours past call time, tweaking the script late into the game, and generally running the show with an ego the size of a Dodge Charger—Johnson went into Fast 8 with a few conditions. One was that Diesel be kept as far away from him as possible. “I wanted to forgo drama,” Johnson would say later, confirming that he hadn’t filmed any Fast 8 scenes with Diesel. “I thought that that was the best thing to do. For everybody.”
And that was mostly what happened, with the two stars maintaining separate fiefdoms on set: Vin Village on one end, Team DJ on the other. Yet they depended on each other to get the film done, and during one boiling hot August day in Atlanta, with just a little more than a week left of the marathon hundred-day shoot, Johnson’s patience reached a tipping point—which was when he logged on to his Instagram account and set Fast’s world on fire. Alongside a short and not-so-subtle video clip of Hobbs tossing a prison guard against a wall, he posted a scathing takedown of his Fast 8 experience:
This is my final week of shooting #FastAndFurious8. There’s no other franchise that gets my blood boiling more than this one. An incredible hard working crew. UNIVERSAL has been great partners as well. My female co-stars are always amazing and I love ’em. My male co-stars however are a different story. Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are too chicken shit to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses. When you watch this movie next April and it seems like I’m not acting in some of these scenes and my blood is legit boiling—you’re right. Bottom line is that it’ll play great for the movie and fits this Hobbs character that’s embedded in my DNA extremely well. The producer in me is happy about this part. Final week on FAST 8 and I’ll finish strong. #IcemanCometh #F8 #ZeroToleranceforCandyAsses.
The post was later deleted, but not before it racked up millions of views, earned thousands of comments, and sparked countless headlines speculating as to who the alleged “candy asses” might be. But for anyone who had ever worked on the Fast franchise, the prime suspect was no mystery: Diesel. According to sources on the Fast 8 set, there was not one specific incident between Johnson and Diesel that led to the Instagram rant; rather, it was the steady accumulation of all-too-familiar behavior by Diesel that had reached an intolerable level for Johnson.
The examples were endless. Take the day in Atlanta when the crew, which had prepped to film blue screen footage of Diesel, had been left to bake under the blistering sun for hours while waiting for the star to emerge from his trailer. Or the time when the first-unit team had been shooting the movie’s final scene—a rooftop family BBQ featuring every member of the core cast, including Johnson—during which Diesel’s last-minute negotiations over the script had kept everyone waiting a day and a half. Twelve hours after the crew had arrived that morning to shoot, they had been told to go home and come back the following morning—at which point it had still taken several more hours plus a lunch break for action to be called, by which point hundreds of people had been paid to stand around and do nothing but roll their eyes. According to several crew members, it was the longest amount of time they had ever spent—on any movie—waiting to roll camera.
Even during the Cuba shoot, an exercise that was so politically delicate and precariously engineered that it could fall apart over the slightest incident, Diesel was behaving poorly, with insiders reporting that the star was regularly late and exceptionally pouty about his local accommodations. Even though he was given an entire villa to say in—far better digs than were given to Michelle Rodriguez and Charlize Theron, who stayed at a nearby four-star hotel, to say nothing of the crew bunking at the seen-better-days Hotel Saratoga or in random Airbnbs—Diesel was dissatisfied and insisted on replacing the property’s elderly staff, all Cuban pensioners, with younger workers.
Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World
When the final leg of the Atlanta shoot rolled around, everyone had endured enough. Including Johnson, who by this stage in his career was managing his highly valued time down to the minute. Shooting Fast 8 while balancing the Baywatch reboot and the latest season of his HBO series Ballers, Johnson simply had no seconds to spare—he was a man who was making business deals on the phone between takes. And, yes, he was occasionally so pressed for time that he’d urinate in a water bottle rather than travel to a washroom. Gross, but somewhat efficient. If anyone messed with his schedule, they were a candy ass—someone “completely full of shit,” as Johnson defined the term. And The Rock had zero tolerance for candy asses.
The morning after Johnson’s Instagram post went up, Fast 8’s crew arrived to find the Atlanta base camp covered in cheeky stickers emblazoned with the words “Candy Asses” covered behind a thick red stripe—basically, a “no candy asses allowed” warning, with almost a hundred of the decals plastered across the doors of trailers and on the sides of the golf carts used to get crew from one end of the set to the other. Nobody on set would fess up to making the stickers, and they were quickly torn down. But thanks to Johnson’s post, the stickers, and the hundreds of rumors that immediately started to trail the story, there was an uneasy vibe on the set and in the halls of Universal of not only unease but something approaching betrayal.
The typically private world of a movie set—where secrets are guarded and confidences are kept under wrap by a combination of respect, honor, and good old-fashioned nondisclosure agreements—had been breached. Overwhelmingly, the crew agreed with Johnson’s sentiments. But the star had broken not only the unspoken rule of Hollywood—what happens on set stays on set—but also the prime directive of the Fast-verse: Keep your grudges inside the family. “It caused a firestorm. Yet interestingly enough . . . [it was] as if every single crew member found their way to me and either quietly thanked me or sent me a note,” Johnson said later. “But, yeah, it wasn’t my best day, sharing that. I shouldn’t have shared that. Because at the end of the day, that goes against my DNA. I don’t share things like that. And I take care of that kind of bullshit away from the public. They don’t need to know that. That’s why I say it wasn’t my best day.”
The same day the stickers went up, there was a tense meeting between Diesel and Johnson in the latter’s trailer. With lead producer Neal H. Moritz attending the Summer Olympics in Rio at the time and Universal boss Donna Langley electing to stay put in LA rather than head to Atlanta, given that there was never any “physical” element to the confrontation, the two alpha males were gathered by Universal’s on-set executive, Mark Sourian, to hash things out. With the pair’s dueling security forces standing guard outside Johnson’s trailer—“I wouldn’t go in there,” they said, shooing away curious passersby—the two men got into it.
Johnson was sick of Diesel’s tardiness and general egomania—a source points to a speech Diesel made to the cast and crew in which he proudly referred to himself as the film’s “Daddy”—while Diesel was upset about Johnson’s Instagram post, as well as a joke the actor had made earlier in the year on Ballers about being “bigger and better looking” than Diesel.
Nothing was exactly settled, and the two stars walked away from the impromptu summit still holding on to radically different opinions of each other and their positions in the franchise. The Fast-verse had already lost Paul Walker. Could it afford to lose Johnson, too?
Excerpted from WELCOME TO THE FAMILY: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World. Copyright 2025 by Barry Hertz. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
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