Vin Diesel

The actor Vin Diesel, also known as Mark Sinclair, attended Hunter College for three years in the late 1980s. He was immersed in the inner workings of the theatre through his stepfather, Irving Vincent, who worked as an acting coach and theatre manager. As a teenager, Sinclair earned a few stage roles in Off Off Broadway productions and worked as a club bouncer, taking the name Vin Diesel.

As a student at Hunter, Diesel studied creative writing with the intention of pursuing a career in theater and film, but dropped out before completing his studies in order to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles. The promise of acting roles didn’t materialize as quickly as he hoped, so in 1995 he returned to New York to write, direct, and produce his first short film, Multi-Facial (1995). The feature film Strays (1997) followed, but his big break came when Steven Spielberg cast him in the award-winning blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998). More success on the big screen followed with a leading role in the Riddick series, and playing Dominic Toretto in Fast and The Furious series.

In 2018, Hunter College awarded Diesel an honorary PhD as he gave the school’s commencement speech at Radio City Music Hall. Speaking to the graduates, Sinclair invoked his pride of having attended Hunter. “I would tell everybody that I learned and took so much away from my experience at Hunter College,” he said. “I was young, I was a bouncer, when I wasn’t bouncing I was in these classrooms with the most diverse student body on the planet.”