Fans have been speculating this for a while and now Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has finally addressed it. He has revealed that he will no longer be a part of the Fast & Furious franchise.
via: EW
After starring as the forceful Luke Hobbs in Fast installments 5 through 8 and headlining his own spin-off Hobbs & Shaw, Dwayne Johnson sat out last month’s F9. Still, fans have held out hope that he would return to the main series in the previously announced final two films. But some recent news is sure to make them, well, furious.
“I laughed and I laughed hard,” Johnson said to The Hollywood Reporter of Fast patriarch Vin Diesel’s recent comments that the duo’s beef can be traced back to the “tough love” he gave the wrestler-turned-actor to elicit a great performance on 2011’s Fast Five. Continued Diesel, “Not Felliniesque, but I would do anything I’d have to do in order to get performances in anything I’m producing.”
Johnson thinks “everyone had a laugh at that” and that he’ll “leave it at that,” before confirming, once and for all, that he won’t be rejoining the family.
“I wish them well on Fast 9,” he said. “And I wish them the best of luck on Fast 10 and Fast 11 and the rest of the Fast & Furious movies they do that will be without me.”
Johnson’s declaration comes only a month after the F9 mid-credits scene featured a surprise cameo by Jason Statham, Johnson’s partner on Hobbs & Shaw, which has been widely-expected to continue with a sequel.
Appearing on EW’s BINGE: The Fast Saga, F9 director Justin Lin, who worked with Johnson on Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, teased what the reappearance of Statham’s Deckard Shaw and his face-to-face meeting with Han (Sung Kang) means for the future of Fast.
“I feel like it’s making a big promise,” Lin said. “It’s so funny because I’d called [Statham] and he came and did the tag for 6, and we had talked about all this stuff. Then I called him one day and said, ‘Hey, Jason, I’m not going to do 7.’ He’s like, ‘What?!’ And so then I called him and I say, ‘Hey, Jason, I’m going to have you do the tag for 9.’ And he’s like, ‘But we get to work together after this!'”
Added Kang, “At the end of the day, everybody loves Jason. I want him to be part of the family, I want to have scenes with him — who doesn’t want Jason in their movie? So we got to figure it out, and I know he wants to be a part of it.”
Statham will now just have to rock on without his Rock.
Thoughts?
