I meet Diesel in a London hotel room, a few days before the film’s release. After staging his own entrance to Talib Kweli‘s Won’t You Stay, which blasts out of a speaker he is carrying, Diesel tells me that it was his Facebook fans that encouraged him to take the part of Groot. “The [initial] meeting with Marvel was all about their ‘Phase 3′ plans. [A third wave of films due to be released after The Avengers sequel, The Age of Ultron]. Then last summer this social media craze hit an all-time high and we realised quickly that waiting for 2017 or 2018 wasn’t going to be sufficient for the fans. They wanted something more immediate.” It was his children, however, who really “green lit” the project for him. “I opened up this huge beautiful book of conceptual art and I asked the children, ‘which character do you think Marvel wants daddy to play?’ And my three year-old immediately pointed to the tree. As we get older we lose a little bit of that innocence and the intuition fuelled by it. So when you can see intuition in a child and if you can recognise it, it’s very profound.”