WWE Superstar Roman Reigns is set to make his Hollywood film debut next month with the release of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw on Aug. 2. The former WWE Champion will play the role of Mateo Hobbs, a relative of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Luke Hobbs, and is expected to play a big role in the film’s actions scenes in the latter half of the movie.
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Chris Morgan, who has been writing each installment of the Fast & Furious franchise since Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006, spoke with ComicBook.com on the red carpet of the film’s world premiere in Hollywood, California on Saturday night and brought up integrating Reigns into the film. Morgan brought up how, at the time of filming, Reigns was still in his battle with leukemia that kept him out of action in WWE from October 2018-March 2019.
“Talk about truly heroic things, right?” Morgan said. “So yeah, so Joe [Roman] is Dwayne’s cousin, and when we were putting together the Hobbs brothers, we knew right away that we wanted to bring him in. And so Dwayne had reached out and said, you’ll have to talk to him about this, but paraphrasing, he’s like, ‘Brother, I know what you’re going through, and whatever, and I want to support you, and we’d love to, at a minimal level, if you want to come in, if it’s fun for you, great, and if not, we want to have action and stuff for you.’
“And he came in and he was feeling so good, and such a champ, he was body slamming people in Kauai, throwing, wait till you see the ancient weapons battle in, like the Samoan ancient weapons battle, it’s pretty insane,” he added.
Morgan was also asked if any aspect of Johnson and Reigns’ WWE personas would play a role in the action scenes.
“I think we would be an idiot if we didn’t,” he said.
In a recent interview with ComicBook, Reigns described what it was like working alongside his cousin on the set of the film.
“It is pretty neat,” he said. “I’m sure, you know, just about everybody who meets him gets star struck and he has that name and that lure where it’s larger than life, biggest super star on Earth, biggest actor on Earth. But when you around him he’s very personable, he’s very humble. He doesn’t come off as this mega super star, wealthy rich guy that can fight anywhere he wants at anytime. He comes off very human like.
“… He’s motivating and inspiring. Along with myself and the others, we all have goals and we’re always reaching for more. He’s on a level that I would like to get to one day and have the opportunities to do some of the things he’s done done on the business side. But he doesn’t carry himself like that. He doesn’t carry himself like he wants … he caries himself like a hometown guy that knows everybody and he’s very easy to talk to. It was really cool to see him in his element and still just kinda the same guy that he was before.”
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw hits theaters on August 2.
