While the Fast & Furious movies remain popular offerings of cinematic entertainment to the masses, there have also been some real-life conflicts that have sprung out from the franchise. The biggest of the bunch is without question the feud between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel, who respectively play Luke Hobbs and Dominic Toretto. Now John Cena, who had a brief stint in the Fast & Furious world playing Jakob Toretto, has given his take on this feud, which included describing his former co-stars as being “very alpha.”
Cena stopped by Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast to talk about his career, so naturally that included his time in F9 and Fast X. And while he and Johnson never overlapped in either of those movies, obviously the two are quite familiar with each other from the WWE. So Cena’s pretty well qualified to give an opinion on either men, leading to him giving the following response when Shepard mentioned the rumors about how Johnson and Diesel made for a “tough pairing” when the former came on board for Fast Five in 2011:
There's certainly rumors about that. I can't deny that. You have two very alpha, driven people. You get two, there can only be one.
Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel not getting along, at least publicly, stretches as far back as 2016, when The Rock referred to some of his co-stars in The Fate of the Furious as “candy asses” in an Instagram post. It soon became clear he was talking about Diesel, and from there that spiraled into their infamous feud that led to Johnson leaving the main Fast & Furious film series. However, that didn’t end up being permanent, as Johnson reprised Luke Hobbs in the Fast X mid-credits scene, and now he has another spinoff movie lined up. That’s not to say that the feud is entirely over, but it does seem as though these two are in a much better place now with their work dynamic.
As far as his perspective goes, John Cena brought up in his conversation with Dax Shepard how he has experience adapting to complicated environments from his time wrestling. Because he’s being invited into “someone's home, into someone's family,” in this case that being the Fast & Furious franchise, he has to have “respect” for that “rarefied air,” regardless of how some of the other actors “ look physically in comparison to another human being.” So because he’s a guest, Cena has been careful not to get involved in any of the drama, saying:
I'm not trying to get the sandbox. That's not my thing. I'm grateful for what you've given me, I just want to be be the best firetruck I can.
As things currently stand, Dwayne Johnson will return to the Fast & Furious franchise for Hobbs & Reyes, where he’ll costar opposite Jason Momoa in a midquel bridging the events of Fast X and Fast 11, which will wrap up the main Fast Saga. It remains to be seen if Johnson will also appear in Fast 11, but even after the main film series concludes, the franchise as a whole is expected to continue with other spinoffs. For John Cena, though, his time in the Fast & Furious world came to an end when Jakob Toretto sacrificed his life in Fast X so that Dom could save his son Brian.
Fast 11 is set for release on April 4, 2025, but Hobbs & Reyes doesn’t have a release date yet. Both Fast X and John Cena’s newest movie, Ricky Stanicky, can be streamed with an Amazon Prime Video subscription.
