Efficient Diesel

He may play neanderthal he-men in movies like XXX and The Fast and the Furious. But Vin Diesel has hankerings to be taken seriously - at least, seriously as a comedian. Donald Clarke talks to the big man with the rolling thunder voice.

'I WENT out to Los Angeles and was very proud of the fact that I was this trained stage actor," Vin Diesel explains. "Well, they didn't care and so, at 24, I found myself back in New York, still with no agent. I went back to college as an English major. Things got so desperate I even took a journalism class." Ha ha.

"One of the exercises was to write your own obituary. So I wrote that this guy changed the face of Hollywood; his accolades are too many to number; he is the first multicultural star. And all my classmates are looking at me as if I am delusional. This guy is borrowing 50 cents from us for a bagel and now he's going to change Hollywood."

Diesel stops rumbling for a moment to allow the man from the Tromsø Bugle and the lady from the Brno Argus to construct the implied punch line. Look at me now, his coy introversion seems to say. They laughed back then, but here I am publicising my new film, The Pacifier, in a Paris hotel room with a huddle of European journalists. I play a Navy Seal forced to take care of a group of children when their parents are kidnapped. I change nappies and get in touch with my inner baby. I'm great, me.

Vin Diesel really is an awfully peculiar piece of work. How to describe him without insinuating something unintended? Well, he's just so, erm, dainty. His body may have the dimensions of a cabin cruiser and his rolling-thunder voice may sound as if it emanates from tweeterless speakers, but his delivery is unexpectedly arch. Everything is said with an implicit nudge and an inherent wink.

The more you learn about him, the more surprising he becomes. The star of action films such as xXx and The Fast and the Furious was raised in bohemian Greenwich Village and began his career in the off-Broadway company run by his stepfather.

"I grew up in the heart of the artistic community of New York City," the unlikely beatnik explains. "And we were very resourceful in finding ways to entertain ourselves and others. This was the breakdance era and we did a bit of that. I would take the subway when I was eight and get off at 42nd Street station to listen to some old guy play Sam Cook tunes. That was where I really grew up. That was where I learned to entertain."

Diesel soon discerned that, as the son of an African-American father and an Italian-American mother, he was causing casting agents some confusion. In 1994, frustrated by the perceived need to declare for one race or the other, he put together a short film on the subject called Multi-Facial. Three years later he directed and starred in a no-budget feature named Strays. How did the budding indie director turn into the new century's Van Damme?

"How did that happen?" he growls. "Before I was ever in an action film I was spending my time in Cannes, asking people to come see my movies. Then a few years later I was in competition at Sundance. My experience was as a writer, director and actor. And I suppose I began directing because I was the only person who would hire me."

Eventually a copy of Multi-Facial landed on Steven Spielberg's desk. Impressed by Diesel's undeniable charisma, the director created a role specifically for him in Saving Private Ryan.

"The first time I ever qualified for health benefits was when I was in Wexford, Ireland, in that film," he says. "I had been in the Screen Actors Guild since I was 19 or 20, but never made enough money to qualify. But I was actually insured while I was in Wexford by the Writer's Guild. I had been hired earlier to write a film about my time in New York as a bouncer and earned enough for cover. Which was good. That beachhead was a dangerous place."

While the Bratislava Sun Times discovers what they use for baby poo in The Pacifier (split-pea soup, apparently), I ponder the peculiar trajectory of Vin Diesel's career. After Saving Private Ryan, he appeared as the voice of the Iron Giant in the charming animated feature of the same name. At this stage, before we realised that his range barely stretched from gruff to quite gruff, it seemed as if Vin might forge a career as an interesting character actor. It wasn't to be. In Pitch Black and The Fast and the Furious, respectable films in unrespectable genres, he cemented his persona as a big man that bigger metal things can't kill.

Schwarzenegger had abandoned the movies to save California from itself. An ageing Stallone was making films so stupid even Stallone fans wouldn't go and see them. The public had rumbled Van Damme. The industry happily welcomed a new action hero with original charm and an appreciation of his own preposterousness. But that's enough about The Rock.

To be fair, in one regard at least, Vin Diesel's emergence was welcome. It is certainly pushing it to suggest - remember that premature auto-obituary - that Hollywood transformed itself when confronted with his multi-ethnic gorgeousness, but in recent years the industry, mindful of Halle Berry's Oscar, has seemed a little less eager to categorise actors by their race.

"I think it is beginning to feel good in that way," he agrees. "Multi-Facial ends with this blonde girl saying: 'I don't know what to do. They always say I am too blonde or too much of a bimbo.' Every actor has to deal with being 'too' something. But I think it is getting better.

"I just did a film called Find Me Guilty with Sidney Lumet, and Peter Dinklage is in it." (Dinklage, star of the indie hit The Station Agent and recently an impressive Richard III off-Broadway, is a dwarf.) "He plays an attorney, but his size is never talked about. That was the message of Multi-Facial: let's have these actors come on because of their abilities alone."

Having established himself as one sort of talent, Diesel, understandably enough, is eager to demonstrate that he can do other things. He has long harboured ambitions to direct himself in a film based on the life of Hannibal and I notice that, clearly still optimistic, he is wearing a bracelet fashioned from little metal elephants. Sadly, following the ho-hum performances of Alexander and Kingdom of Heaven, the public's lust for dusty epics seems to have waned.

But, as Schwarzenegger demonstrated before him, the tough man is always useful to directors interested in the comedy of incongruity. Hence The Pacifier, a poor man's Kindergarten Cop (there's a phrase to chill the blood).

Diesel is happy to explain that he got on so well with the babies, he was summoned to rock the little actors to sleep even when he wasn't otherwise needed on set. He tells us how delighted he is that his nieces and nephews can now see one of his films. He does some poo gags.

Is some Scandinavian about to ask if he got broody on set? I'm afraid so.

"What a question," he says. "I am still waiting for that woman to come along. Some find love when they are 21. They find love and have kids. My twin brother has two kids. It's hard. You have to do so much driving and pushing in this business." Get in line, girls.

The Pacifier opens next Friday