Too fast, too furious? Vin Diesel and a history of disaster on high-speed Hollywood sets

Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel dice with death in 2009’s Fast & Furious CREDIT: Universal

There was tragic news from the set of Fast & Furious 9 on Monday, when Vin Diesel’s stuntman reportedly suffered a serious head injury at the Warner Bros Leavesden studios in Hertfordshire. The accident is said to have happened when a safety cable snapped as the stuntman leaped from a balcony for a fight sequence.

“The stuntman fell at least 30 feet – maybe a bit more,” a source told The Sun. “Vin Diesel was seen on set seconds after. He looked ashen, totally in shock and blinking back tears. He saw what happened.”

Latest reports say that the stuntman – named by the tabloid as Joe Watts, who also worked on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Game of Thrones – is now in an induced coma.

For Vin Diesel, it’s not the first time that a film production has been rocked by a tragic accident. In 2002, his stuntman Harry O’Connor was killed on the set of xXx. And, though unrelated to filming, the Fast & Furious series’s original lead star Paul Walker was killed in a high-speed car crash during the production of Fast & Furious 7 – a horribly ironic accident that has left a spectre of tragedy hanging over the series since.

“It made for a very hard time to finish filming that movie,” said Diesel on the Jonathan Ross Show in 2015. “The studio was wonderful, exceptional in allowing us to have such a special tribute for him in the end… the relationships in that franchise are so strong, and the brotherhood so real, that it transcends the experience of making the movie.

The actor Paul Walker was killed when his Porsche crashed in Valencia, California on November 30 2013 CREDIT: Dan Watson/AP

“I spend 15 years going from being a nobody to somebody with a brother, and then one day he’s gone and it’s a very heavy experience… somehow this is different than the other losses I’ve had. This was unlike anything we could have imagined.”

For a series built around car chases and ludicrous stunts, accidents have been mercifully few across the 10 Fast & Furious installments (including the forthcoming Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham-starring spinoff, Hobbs & Shaw).

As arguably the most significant action franchise from the age of digital moviemaking, you might assume that most of its action sequences were created inside a computer rather than on the highway. (Not to mention the fact that cars don’t jump between skyscrapers or drive out of aeroplanes without a bit of CG-assisted trickery.) But the series has always been committed to shooting practical action sequences.

For the opening sequence of the franchise’s fourth installment, Michelle Rodriguez and her stuntman were strapped to the back of a speeding gas tanker; in the opening gambit of Fast Five, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker’s stuntmen leaped from a car as it zoomed off a cliff and plunged into the water below, and in Fast & Furious 7, Walker’s stuntman ran across the top of a bus as it dangled halfway off a cliff before plummeting.

As the longtime star of the franchise, Vin Diesel has a reputation for doing his own stunts, though a quick Google will find reports of stuntmen and extreme sports stars brought in, unsurprisingly, to execute his most dangerous sequences on both the Fast & Furious and xXx franchises. But it’s true that the 52-year-old Diesel has taken this work extremely seriously since the death of Harry O’Connor, the aerial stunt coordinator and stuntman killed during the production of xXx.

“There was a bad experience early on where we lost one of the stunt guys,” said Diesel in 2015, being interviewed on publicity duties for The Last Witch Hunter. “That, probably more than anything, has made me that focused on safety and rehearsal, and I probably take the rehearsal of action sequence and choreography that much more seriously.”

Harry O’Connor was a retired Navy Seal and well-known skydiver and stuntman. He had previously performed stunts in Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Charlie’s Angels. For this particular scene in xXx, Diesel’s character Xander Cage – an adrenaline junkie-turned-government spy – would paraglide down the Vltava River in Prague, zip-line down from the parachute, swing under the Palacký Bridge, and land on a boat.

But during filming on April 4 2002, O’Connor hit the bridge at full speed and broke his neck. He died on the spot from his injuries. He was 44 years old. According to a report on Ain’t It Cool News at the time, it was the second take of the stunt: the first attempt had gone according to plan and is actually used in the finished version of the movie. When Vin Diesel reprised the role for 2017’s xXx: Return of Xander Cage, the character had a tattoo bearing Harry O’Connor’s name on his leg.

Though it’s rare for stunt performers to be killed, it’s not unheard of. In 2017, stuntwoman Joi Harris was killed in a motorcycle accident on Deadpool 2. Also in 2017, stuntman John Bernecker died after falling 22 feet from a balcony on the set of The Walking Dead.

“We had 500 stuntmen involved with this picture, 499 didn’t get a scratch,” said xXx director Rob Cohen, speaking on the DVD commentary. “It shows the kind of length we’ll go to to bring this kind of intense experience to the viewer.

“Stuntmen know they’re in danger. They making their living through danger. Most of the time it’s alright – sometimes, unfortunately, it isn’t.”