He said that as a producer for the "Fast & Furious" franchise, he felt he had to take a hard stance with Johnson, who played Luke Hobbs.
"It was a tough character to embody, the Hobbs character," Diesel told Men's Health.As a producer to say, 'Okay, we're going to take Dwayne Johnson, who's associated with wrestling, and we're going to force this cinematic world, audience members, to regard his character as someone that they don't know' -- Hobbs hits you like a ton of bricks."
Johnson pushed back on that in his interview with Vanity Fair, saying, "I've been around the block a lot of times.