When Game of Thrones began, did anyone think that Jason Momoa would become probably the biggest star to come out of it, with the possible exception of Pedro Pascal? Well, maybe; even though Momoa only played Khal Drogo for one season of the HBO show, his charisma boiled off the screen. He’s gone on to play superheroes like Aquaman, supervillains like Dante in Fast X, and literary characters like Duncan Idaho in Dune.
Dante will be back in the eleventh Fast & Furious movie, and will be just as wild and unpredictable as ever. “It’s never twice the same with Jason,” director Louis Leterrier told Empire. “Dante will truly evolve. Let’s explore something we haven’t seen before.”
The character of Dante was conceived as dark and disturbed, and he was that, but Momoa also brought a lot of dark joy to the role. “He was fueled by vengeance,” Leterrier said of Dante. “He could have played it dark, angry. But it was interesting to play with the duality and the push-pull within the character, where within the same sentence he’s laughing and feels the pain of losing everything. Only an actor like Jason could have done that.”
As you can expect of an actor as expressive and instinctive as Momoa, some things about Dante were thought up on the fly. “In that Brazil scene, he walked on set, saw the palm trees and said, ‘I want to be a palm tree.’ And he put his his hair in a bun like a palm tree. Our goal was to make each other laugh. If we were able to make each other crack up, we thought, ‘Okay, the audience will laugh.'”
Jason Momoa made up things about his Fast & Furious villain on the spot
According to Leterrier, the goal with Dante was to create a “Bizarro” version of lead character Dominic Toretto, played by Vin Diesel these past two decades. “Dom drives a car, you ride a motorcycle. Dom has a shaved head, you have long hair. Dom is a man of few words, you love the sound of your voice.” Where Dom hates to lose a fight, Dante seems to enjoy it.
"He lets Dom punch him out. He fights as well as Dom, but he’s twisted. If you look deeply into his psyche, he’s lonely. He’s fun and flamboyant, but he’s alone. He’s created his own world in his head. He’s not on the same plane of reality that we are."
The eleventh Fast & Furious movie is due out on April 4, 2025. The way this franchise spawns spinoffs and sequels, who knows if we’ll be watching a solo Dante movie in a few years?
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h/t SyFy Wire