EW found Johnny Strong to ask him about the past and future of his character.
“I don’t have any friends because I have family.”
Seven (soon to be eight) Fast & Furious movies have taught us a lot, like that cars can fly and that Ja Rule cost himself a lot of money. But the most important thing to learn is that nothing is more important than family. But what happens if a family member goes missing and is never seen or heard from again?
Johnny Strong says, “Every week, people who like my work or Fast & Furious ask me, ‘What happened to Leon?'” “If you watch the movie and get to know the characters, it would make sense that he would leave just as quickly as he came.
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As the series has gone on, players like Roman Pearce (Tyrese), Tej Parker (Ludacris), and Luke Hobbs have been added to Dom’s ragtag group (Dwayne Johnson). In the beginning, though, there were the original five: Dom (Vin Diesel), Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Vince (Matt Schulze), Jesse (Chad Lindberg), and Leon (Strong). Only Dom and Letty are still on the team. Jesse was killed in The Fast and the Furious, and Vince came back to try to make things right in Fast Five, but he also died. No one really knows what happened to Leon, not even the actor who played him.
If you don’t watch Fast & Furious all the time, you might be wondering, “Who is Leon?” Even Strong wondered about this when he called the character a “lost loner type.” Leon’s one and only appearance didn’t tell us much about him besides the fact that he liked to wear generic basketball jerseys and yell at pizza delivery guys. In fact, Strong didn’t know much about his character’s past until he saw the movie. When Mia (Jordana Brewster) tells Brian (Paul Walker) that Leon “just showed up one night and never left,” Strong got a hint about Leon’s past.
Well, he had left by the end of the movie. After their big final robbery went wrong, which Strong says Leon didn’t want to do, the character was seen driving Dom, Mia, and an injured Letty away. Just before Jesse died, Dom told Brian that Leon and Letty have been gone for a long time. Rodriguez didn’t appear in 2 Fast 2 Furious or Tokyo Drift, but she did come back, even though she was thought to have died in between. Leon is still nowhere to be found after seven movies.
Strong says, “As the movie goes on, there’s a scene near the end where Leon kind of says what he doesn’t like, and Dom shuts him down. This shows that Leon is starting to doubt his leader, and Dom is losing control of his gang and mission.” “After that, Jesse is killed and Letty and Vince are very close to dying, so I think it’s clear that Leon was done with that situation. He didn’t want anything more to do with the gang because the heat had become too dangerous.”
Before Fast & Furious became a $1 billion business, it was a movie called Redline about street racing. Strong got the part of Leon, which was originally written for a much darker version of the character than the one that made it to the big screen. Strong says, “One of the things I liked about it was that it was a small, rough movie about underground racers who did heists in the middle of the night.” “When I look back, no one knew what would happen, and if they say they did, they are lying.”
Even though Diesel and Rodriguez, two other original cast members, have built their careers around the series, Strong’s relationship with Fast was pretty much over when he finished filming The Fast and the Furious. He missed the premiere of Black Hawk Down because he was in Morocco at the time. He finally saw it when he got back to the U.S., which was the only time he would ever see any of the movies in the series.
Audiences have liked how the series has changed from street racing in L.A. to cars jumping through buildings in Abu Dhabi, but Strong misses the more realistic and believable stakes of the first movie. “From the looks of the new movie trailers, in which a man grabs a torpedo that is being fired from a submarine,… I feel like it’s kind of gone too far, “Says he.
Strong has focused on his music career and gotten more involved in the making of movies behind the scenes. He often writes the music for the movies he stars in, like the recent post-apocalyptic thriller Daylight’s End. Even though he says he hasn’t had time to go back to the Fast movies, Strong would be willing to do so, but with a big catch.
“It would have to be the right situation, and it would have to make sense in terms of the characters and the story,” says Strong. He suggests that Leon could either fight against his old friends or save them when it looks like all is lost. “If I was involved, I would hope that it would go back to how rough it was when it first started. They might not be interested, but I’m not really interested in doing something just to get a big check and do it for the sake of doing it.”
Strong thinks that the fact that Leon’s whereabouts are unknown adds to the character’s mystery and appeal, and he compares it to the cult following that Boba Fett has in Star Wars.
He says, “I love knowing that Leon is somewhere in the Fast & Furious universe.” “Because he can’t be solved, that’s what keeps the spirit alive. I think it’s cool that people still talk about a character who was probably in the movie for a total of five minutes.”
