Tyrese Gibson revealed that the cast of Fast & Furious had difficulty carrying on with filming new installments of the franchise of films after the untimely death of Paul Walker. Gibson starred in the series of films alongside Walker until the actor's tragic passing in 2013 ,when the future of the hugely successful franchise was in flux. Its stars had to decide whether or not to continue filming the character-driven drama centered around car races.
The Fast & Furious series began as a standalone film about illegal street car races and turned into a windfall series of movies that turned its stars into cult icons. Although the Fast & Furious movies are known for insane action sequences, at the core of the series is an unlikely group of characters that worked together and created their own family dynamic. This family has sustained the series of films since 2001 when The Fast and the Furious first hit theaters. The cast has a family-like bond off-screen, illustrated by the reactions to Walker's passing.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gibson claimed that he had more bad memories than good, because of all of the fun and all of the magic the cast had going on before Walker's untimely death. He claimed the trauma of losing him superseded all of that and once Furious 7 came out, he found the film hard to watch.
"The first thing all of us were struggling with was, 'What the hell are we doing here? What's Fast & Furious without Paul? And are we going to come off as just a bunch of narcissists that's moving and proceeding and deciding what Paul meant to the franchise, and going to say, 'We're moving forward anyway.' So we had to become each other's therapists. Because if you lose someone and you put it up on social media or the word gets out that you lost someone, you don't want to hear from everybody - you want to hear from the people that knew him the most. So we made sure that we were there for each other in a real way. "
Many viewers considered Walker the heart of the franchise, which is why it was so difficult to move on. The actor received a very touching sendoff in Furious 7 that illustrated how much he meant to the movies. Fast & Furious 9 director Justin Lin recently confirmed Walker's character Brian O'Conner is still alive in the films' universe, a fact he knows will have to be acknowledged at some point. It will be interesting to see how that's handled in one of the upcoming Fast & Furious movies, since everyone involved knows it's a sensitive topic. Fortunately, the creative team understands how much Walker meant to the Fast & Furious cast, crew, and fans, so they will treat any Brian O'Conner reference with the appropriate care.
Gibson's remarks about Walker show how the actor's presence still looms over the set of the film series, which will reportedly conclude after the 11th film. The final two installments are rumored to tell a story that will take two films to conclude and will star Vin Diesel as well as Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, and Sung Kang. While longtime fans of the franchise will mourn the loss of these films after a 20-year run in theaters, there remains a hope the conclusion of the Fast & Furious franchise will come to a tight finish without running out of gas.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
