Its hardly a well kept secret that Vin Diesel is a huge Dungeons & Dragons nerd. The 55-year-old wrote the foreword for the commemorative book 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons in 2004, and even left his voice to the 2015 ASMR game Vin Diesel DMing a Game of D&D Just For You, in which players can challenge the Fast and Furious star to a quick game of DnD.
So Diesel must feel especially proud that his son Vincent Sinclair is following in his footsteps. In fact, the newly-minted 12-year-old is apparently such a big fan of the game that Diesel even surprised his son with a Dungeons & Dragons themed cake for his birthday.
“I started playing [Dungeons & Dragons] when I was 12,” Diesel captioned the photo on Instagram. “So on his birthday this month, it was surreal to have this be his birthday cake. Haha. All love, Always.”
Coincidentally enough, Diesel’s longtime friend and Fast and Furious co-star Michelle Rodriguez recently got tapped for the upcoming blockbuster DnD movie, Honor Among Thieves, which will hit theaters next year. And if anyone was wondering if he’s jealous of the role … Well, that kind of just goes without saying.
“Yeah it’s great. I get to rub it in his face,” Rodriquez said during the Honor Among Thieves panel at San Diego Comic-Con last month. “Dude, he’s a Dungeon Master. If you ever took a look at his closet, he’s got all the paraphernalia of a Dungeons & Dragons fiend. He puts a lot of his Dungeon Master techniques into making movies and producing them.”
Diesel also waxed poetic about his favorite game on AMC’s entertainment-themed talk show, Shootout, which ran for five seasons from 2003 though 2008.
“In the ’70s, growing up in New York City, early ’80s … we played very intensely this game called Dungeons & Dragons,” Diesel explained. “And we would go and we would buy these large canvases and treat them to make it look like old maps, aged maps, and then we’d use them to create these worlds, and we’d be in this campaign for eight months. And even while I was bouncing, which is the antithesis of Dungeons & Dragons, even when when I had a night off, I was playing.”
“And what would happen, aside from the fact that it is a training ground for your imagination, but when you would play as a character, about two hours into it, your voice would change, your body composition would change, at any moment you could get up from the table and pull out a sword,” he continued. “You know, you’re as animated as you would want to be. So imagine Dungeons & Dragons with a table filled with ardens, whether they’re painters or whether they’re actors, or whatever they are, they’re able to live in this world of imagination.”
You can watch the clip below:
