Vin Diesel couldn’t finish the sentence without his voice breaking.
It was Monday night in Los Angeles, at the Director’s Village Theater, the same theater where the first ‘Fast and Furious’ premiered 25 years earlier. There, surrounded by Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez, with his 91-year-old father seated among the audience, Diesel spoke for nearly eight minutes about the family he built through this saga. And among the audience was Meadow Walker, daughter of Paul Walker, his co-star and friend who died in 2013.
“If any of you are blessed enough to have a brother like him, it’s the greatest gift God could grant you”, Diesel said, his gaze lost in memories from a quarter century ago. The original cars from the first film, the Dodge Charger and the orange Toyota Supra, waited outside the theater as silent witnesses to everything that began there. The saga continues, but that brotherhood, Diesel said, never went away.