This Is What You Need To Know About ‘Fast X’ And Jason Momoa’s Flamboyant Bad Guy

Fast X director Louis Leterrier knew that Jason Momoa’s showstopping, scene-stealing, flamboyant villain would raise eyebrows and questions, but he didn’t care.

“It was actually something that came out after one of the previews. Somebody was like, ‘Is his character gay?’ I said, ‘What does it matter? Honestly, why?’ People were like, ‘I want to know.’ It doesn’t matter.” The filmmaker recalled. “What matters is that Jason is amazing. He is one thousand percent Momoa.”

The actor has previously described his character as “sadistic, androgynous and a bit of a peacock” with “daddy issues.” Momoa’s exuberant performance was something Leterrier actively encouraged.

“I let him go with it. Actually, I didn’t let him; I pushed that sled down the mountain,” he laughed. “Jason was like, ‘I want to go crazy,’ and I was like, ‘Great. I will pick you up and give you more speed to go faster.’ That’s exactly what I did, and I love what we have.”

Unsurprisingly, Momoa’s Dante Reyes, the son of Fast Five‘s drug lord bad guy, Hernan Reyes, is out for revenge and has Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto, his crew, and family in his sights. The penultimate entry in the film franchise, which has spanned two decades and grossed over $6.6 billion at the worldwide box office, lands in theaters on Friday, May 19, 2023.

Leterrier took over directing duties after Justin Lin, who has helmed five Fast films, left the project shortly after filming on Fast X began.

“What I had available to me was a great script and nine other movies plus the spin-off and short films, so there was this massive amount of information,” Leterrier explained. “For me, it started with Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin’s script, which I thought was amazing. I loved the structure of twisting the world of Fast and Furious on his head and starting with the happy moments with everything going downhill from there.”

Leterrier saw Fast X as “a great opportunity to break it up and create twist upon twist” within the lore.

“It was also really challenging to never lose sight of the characters. For me, the best things in the Fast and Furious franchise are the characters,” the filmmaker added. “That’s one of the major reasons this series is the longest-lasting with a single cast. I fell in love with them.”

With Fast X being the first installment in the franchise’s two-part finale, Leterrier had the unenviable job of handling a cliffhanger, leaving audiences satisfied and wanting more. That’s where he leaned into his experience on the small screen.

“That was a little bit of a challenge, but I became a better movie director having done TV,” the director revealed. “I think TV helped me understand characters and full story arcs. TV was this much larger canvas, I had ten hours to tell a story, so I could understand everything and paint freely. That was where I could all do my stuff, and now I’m zooming back into two hours.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s use the same methodology that I use on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance or Lupin and then apply that to this,” Leterrier continued. “I showran this movie. I had Post-it notes on the wall where Vin Diesel was red, and Michelle Rodriguez was blue, and so on with all the other characters, and I was building it that way and moving things around, so I could see where stuff was missing or too busy so then I filled it up. Honestly, it helped me a lot.”

Leterrier also found clarity when he showed the evolving Fast X to audiences and got their feedback. It was a process he found invaluable.

“Screen testing really helped me,” he admitted with a hint of relief. “I love that process because that’s where you find your tone. We literally did one where we went from super dark tones to tones that were too bright and funny. Our last preview was where I wanted to do the comedy pass. People were laughing and cheering; it was like a rock concert, and they were like, ‘This is the best action-comedy of the summer.’ I was like, ‘Oh no. That’s not what I want.’ I knew it might happen.”

While Leterrier didn’t want too much humor, he did want Fast X to have an element of it. Finding the right balance was something the director learned from Sacha Baron Cohen when he helmed The Brothers Grimsby.

“We were testing joke after joke after joke every week. It was like stand-up comedians trying their material,” he recalled.

While he tweaked many of the film’s elements, Leterrier never altered Fast X‘s structure.

“We might have changed a couple of scenes here and there, but we didn’t change the main structure of what we ultimately shot,” the director explained. “One thing to mention is that there is only half a scene on the cutting room floor, not even a full scene. Everything we shot ended up in the movie, and we didn’t do any reshoots. Justin Lin shot a couple of days, I kept his stuff because it was great, and then I found my own way in.”

However, there was one major spanner in the works for Leterrier.

“I was about to go to England to shoot the movie, which is that they lost the location for the third act so that to be reimagined,” he explained. “I took the bones of what was done and the previous plan, and then we did what we have in the finished movie. It was like a snowball effect but backward. When I landed, and we started shooting, I was always working on the script, as most directors do, so we could keep evolving.

“One thing that I told them, and I realized this quickly during my TV show days, is that you end up rewriting a pilot when you write the end of the season. You need to plant the seeds there to harvest them at the end.”

Leterrier was recently confirmed as the director for the franchise’s final entry, which will hit theaters in 2025. Even before he agreed to take that opportunity, he wanted to know one key element.

“My first thing to Vin and everyone else was, ‘Where does this franchise end? We know it’s ending.’ So we came up with the ending, and then we know exactly where we are going, who lives or dies, and what happens in between,” the director concluded. “We seeded everything back. Everything in Fast X, the words, props, twists, and reveals, is geared towards the ending. Get ready.”