Dungeon & Dragons fan and occasional talking tree Vin Diesel will only be in a D&D movie if it’s appropriately “sacred,” he’s told interviewers, apparently owing to a legacy—or maybe a geas, we’re not sure—laid upon him by game co-creator Gary Gygax. (Diesel was asked about his sword-swinging, spell-slinging fandom while doing press for The Last Witch Hunter, a movie in which he appears to do at least one of those things.)
The actor and producer said he’s been approached in the past to be part of a D&D movie, but that he was “too busy at the time.” (He also referred to past Hollywood adaptations of the game as “failed” and not “done right,” in what may be the kindest things ever said about the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons film.)
Diesel then went on to recount a little legend of his own, talking about the time 300 and Sin City creator Frank Miller was hanging out at his house—because that is how Vin Diesel rolls, living his life 1d4 miles at a time. Miller apparently passed on a conversation he’d had with the since-deceased Gygax, in which the war-gaming pioneer had told him that he wanted Diesel “to tell his story.” (The actor was “really, really shocked” by this pronouncement, an emotional state that presumably caused whole millimeters of movement to take place on his impassively stoic face.)
Consequently, Diesel said that any project that rights-owner Warner Bros. might set in the world of D&D “would have to be very sacred,” if it wanted him to be involved. (As a veteran player, Diesel almost certainly knows that a sacred screenplay gives +1 against Jeremy Irons, and turns undead as though its bearer were a 4th level priest.) “That’s how you get me,” he concluded, before heading to his next junket interview to answer some more hard-hitting questions about THAC0, or maybe Vampire: The Masquerade.