Vin Diesel Pays Tribute to Paul Walker on Anniversary of His Death

By Russ Burlingame

On the ninth anniversary of Paul Walker's death, Walker's The Fast & The Furious co-star Vin Diesel shared a photo of the two together and a brief remembrance of the actor. The anniversary of Walker's death is always a moment for reflection for Diesel, his co-stars, and fans of the franchise, given how young Walker was when he passed away and the senselessness of his loss. While the themes of love and found family were present in the early Fast & Furious movies, it did not become a focus of the conversation around them until after Walker died, and the rest of the cast dedicated the seventh film in the franchise to his memory.

Walker's death shocked the world in 2013. On November 30th of that year, Walker and friend Roger Rodas were driving together at a high speed in Santa Clarita, California. Having just left a charity fundraiser together, the two were killed when Rodas, who was driving, crashed into a light pole and the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT burst into flames.

You can see it below.

In 2015, as production wrapped on Fast & Furious 7, Diesel and his partner welcomed a daughter, named Pauline (after Walker).

"He was in the room," Diesel said at the time. "There's no other person that I was thinking about as I was cutting this umbilical cord. I just ... knew he was there."

Walker and Diesel appeared in five Fast & Furious movies before Walker's death. The seventh film, which was released after, included Walker's character using a combination of footage shot for the film, trick photography, and brief appearances by Walker's own brother. The film served as a swan song for Walker's character and ended in a touching sequence paying tribute to the late actor.

"We knew that technically, when it came to the mechanics of it, there were certain boxes we wanted to check," Mike Knobloch, President of Film Music and Publishing at Universal Pictures, said of the sequence's song. "Coming off of this incredible two hours of the most sensational action-packed stuff you've ever seen in a movie, you have a sequence that needs to be balanced. It has to be appropriately touching and emotional, but you still want people to get out of their seats and leave the theater feeling good. You don't want the sequence to cancel out the movie they've seen, and you certainly don't want people to walk out feeling sad or that they just attended somebody's funeral. So getting the music right for the sequence was a key part of that. To have a song that's earnest and sincere and could underscore a celebration of Paul's life. To be an anthem for that. We worked really hard to dial that in."

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