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By the time he has crawled seductively on top of a slinky woman dressed only in her Victoria's Secret ensemble, Diesel's femme fans are howling with carnal delight, their reaction roaring through the darkened place like a sexual tsunami.
This pure, white-hot, animalistic reaction confirms one amazing thing: Vin Diesel is Hollywood's newest superstar, both for his bad-boy sexual appeal and as an action hero. Columbia Pictures is ratcheting up XXX to be one of the biggest hits of the second half of the summer.
Designed as a head-banging, punk rock, anti-James Bond spy-thriller franchise, XXX opens across North American on Friday. Insiders think it stands a chance to rival Austin Powers In Goldmember for second place in the summer box-office sweeps, behind only the mega-hit Spider-Man. Diesel plays a rebellious extreme sport enthusiast who is forcefully recruited by the U.S. government to become an undercover agent who must, of course, save the world. He is signed for a sequel.
For Diesel, the promise that XXX brings is literally a passionate dream come true. He has been gunning for movie stardom most of his life. It is also the end of his anonymity.
"I just took a vacation," Diesel tells The Sun in a one-on-one interview that follows a day of round-table group sessions. "I just did a backpacking tour -- with room service -- all over in Europe. You'll have to excuse me. I'm coming back to 'reality.' I'm hearing all this stuff about a blitz, all this marketing, and the expectations for the film."
He is a man on the edge of his own volcano. Diesel took the vacation with friends as his self-imposed lull before the storm.
"It was important for me because it's that anonymity thing. (I wanted) to savour that last moment. It was nice to do that little grounding-reality thing and take my friends from New York, the same guys who bounced with me, and just go to Europe and just be kind of nobodies. It was fun."
Freshly turned 35 on July 18, New York-born Diesel is a nobody no more. He is on fire, so much so that the current GQ magazine features Diesel on the cover (one of several magazines that do). In the case of GQ, he is surrounded by flames.
Diesel asks if the fire is stoked too high in the photo (one of Diesel's most disarming traits is to ask interviewers for advice). I suggest the image represents the heat surrounding his ascent to stardom. Diesel flashes a grin and says:
"It's a good analogy. It's crazy! But I just want to make magic. Because all this stuff is unexplainable. All this stuff that is happening to me, all this great and wonderful fortune ..." He pauses and, for a moment, he seems overwhelmed.
"I could say until I was blue in the face that I knew it was going to happen. But how would I really know it was going to happen? I wanted it to happen. I believed it. I used to tell people, 'As sure as I'm breathing I'm going to be a movie star!' (But) it's still crazy. It's still weird."
When I suggest that this never could have happened when he was 25 -- that he had not developed the on-screen sex appeal he has today and was not ready as an action hero -- Diesel agrees.
"I think it's all accurate. I think it's dead on. But it wasn't a lack of effort. I started when I was young and (thought) that I should have had it 10 years ago. And I didn't have it. I was frustrated. When you can't pay the rent, you get frustrated. When you can't make ends meet, you get a little frustrated."
He did not make his feature film debut until 1998, when Steven Spielberg cast him as the doomed private Adrian Caparzo in his war epic Saving Private Ryan. Before that, Diesel spent his time working as a bouncer, auditioning, appearing on stage and working for a telemarketer to pay to write and direct his own shorts, Multi-Facial (1994) and Strays (1997).
Spielberg eventually saw Multi-Facial. It led to the Caparzo role. Which led to voice work as the title character in the under-rated animated adventure The Iron Giant. Diesel went on to co-star as a broker in a suit in Boiler Room, as a sci-fi space criminal turned hero in Pitch Black, and most significantly as the car-crazy anti-hero in The Fast And The Furious. That was last summer's surprise hit and set the stage for XXX.
Veteran Rob Cohen directed both The Fast And The Furious and XXX (or Triple-X, as Diesel calls it). He is enthusiastic about talking up Diesel. "Let's start with Vin as just a man, just a talent. Vin has a unique cluster of characteristics that I began to recognize more and more as I did The Fast And The Furious. I'll remind people: He was cast as the second lead."
That was behind Paul Walker, who recently told The Sun he thinks Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson is Diesel's only real rival for future supremacy in the action genre, now that the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis and others are either gearing down or have faded away. "Vin is The Man!"
Cohen continues his analysis of Diesel: "He had an odd vulnerability and a soulfulness that, on the surface and in Pitch Black, you didn't quite see. He has the power and physicality, but what I didn't know, when I cast him in The Fast And The Furious, (was) how deep he could take things and how a kind of charm emerges. In the past, action men have basically been killing machines who can make a joke.
"Vinny, on the other hand, has the courage to be overwhelmed and uncertain and sometimes to be almost nakedly needy. He has that unique polarity and no one else has it."
Actually, Diesel does have his antecedents. Cohen could have been describing John Barrymore -- Drew's famous grandfather -- in his legendary role as the rapscallion French poet-swashbuckler in the 1927 silent film The Beloved Rogue. Diesel does with words what Barrymore did with sly looks. Everything old is new again. But Diesel is unique today.
Except for one thing. He is one of two new multi-racial, multi-cultural action stars. "It has taken America a long time to acknowledge the new face of America," Cohen says, "and, to some degree, Vinny is that new face." The Rock, with his Samoan and Afro-Canadian heritage, is his only match.
"It's dope!" Diesel says of the multi-cultural angle. "It's amazing. It's a huge social thing! We'll see how it unravels."
But exactly what Diesel's heritage might be, of course, is a mystery. And Diesel has no intention of solving that mystery, although there are stories he is Afro-American and Italian. Cohen says he has heard rumours of a Cuban background, although he has never asked for information from the source.
Diesel refuses to discuss his family background himself, although there are printed sources that claim his real name is Mark Vincent, that his stepfather is a New York theatre teacher, that he has no interest in his real father, that his mother is an astrologist-psychiatrist, and that his non-identical, fair-skinned, blue-eyed twin brother, Paul Vincent, is an aspiring film editor who received a credit on Diesel's Multi-Facial.
"I want to keep my mystery," Diesel tells The Sun. "The thing is -- and this is important -- it's not that I'm hiding anything. It's not that I don't want people to know anything. It's just that I would rather spend more time talking about more productive things that relate to the film.
"Harrison Ford said the same thing, you know -- the reason he wants to keep his private life private is that, when he becomes a character, you're not thinking about who he's dating. It's so hard, if you become too much of a celebrity, to be an actor who can blend into different roles. So I want to keep that as much as possible."