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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Vin Diesel, the star of the spy-movie pastiche "XXX," has serious pecs and abs and, I'm told, a provocative belly button (it's high). He shaves his head, and his voice is a laughing street rumble with a slightly acrid, burned-onion edge--he is certainly an antidote to the bland, pretty-boy style of such young actors as Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Josh Hartnett. Diesel performed in a disciplined way in "Saving Private Ryan" and "Boiler Room," and last year he was brazenly funny (if not always intentionally so) as the morally severe thug in the honor-among-car-thieves classic "The Fast and the Furious." Since he's reportedly half Italian, half African-American, and could probably also pass for Latino, Diesel doesn't leave a great many ethnic groups outside the theatre, and, following the success of "F and F," he has assumed the aura of an inevitable marketing triumph. (He is said to have demanded a fee of thirty million dollars to appear in a sequel.) But is he a movie star? What is a movie star at this point? The editors who put him on magazine covers and the media executives who celebrate his face and body on TV aren't responding to talent. They're responding to an act of brash self-creation. Diesel, thirty-five, was born Mark Vincent and...
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