‘Fast and Furious 9’: How the ‘F9’ Saga Paid Tribute to Paul Walker

The Fast and Furious franchise continues to pay tribute to the late Paul Walker after the star’s tragic death in 2013. In F9, being released Friday, Walker’s character, Brian O’Conner, is still alive, having retired from his high-speed life and enjoying life with Mia (Jordana Brewster). When Mia returns to the Fast family to take on more adventure, Brian stays behind to take care of their son.

At the movie’s close, Entertainment Tonight reports there’s an empty seat at the family dinner. “Hold on,” Dom (Vin Diesel) says, according to the outlet. “There’s still an empty chair.” Mia replies, “He’s on the way,” and outside, Brian’s signature car can be seen heading into the driveway before the credits roll.

When Walker died in a tragic car accident in 2013, midway through filming Furious 7, the franchise decided to have him live on offscreen, using brothers Cody Walker and Caleb Walker as body doubles to finish the film, which debuted in 2015. Earlier this month, Tyrese Gibson recalled how the cast of Furious 7 decided to finish the film without Walker in EW’S BINGE: The Fast Saga.

“I have more bad memories than good, because all of the fun and all of the magic that we had going before Paul Walker’s untimely death, the trauma of losing him superseded all of that,” Gibson admitted of the movie. “Once Furious 7 came out, it was hard to watch. So I definitely don’t have that one on repeat.”

“The first thing all of us were struggling with was, ‘What the hell are we doing here? What’s Fast & Furious without Paul?’” recalled Gibson of resuming filming after Walker’s death. “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.’”

Michelle Rodriguez previously told BINGE it was a “special” experience filming the seventh movie because the cast was “saying goodbye to somebody we love who was there from the jump.” She called the seventh movie an “homage” to Walker, making it a “really, really beautiful film” because of that. “That supersedes anything about the movie itself, the action or the plot or any of that,” she added. “None of that really matters – it’s a goodbye to Paul. And I couldn’t have imagined a better goodbye.”