“I had to appreciate the ingenuity of this super shiny Hollywood movie actually taking the clever turn and pulling in a guy we all knew,” said Casey. “I remember specifically loving ‘Tokyo Drift,’” said the screenwriter, who was especially impressed by the cameo in which Diesel’s Dom made a surprise appearance, tying together the first three films. Indeed, The Times’ own Kenneth Turan described “Tokyo Drift” in his 2006 review as “best viewed as an energetic cartoon, an unintentionally amusing, head-shaking guilty pleasure.”īut Casey had been a fan of the franchise even before he started working with Lin, when he caught “Tokyo Drift” at a Michigan movieplex. It took many installments for critics to get onboard with the suspension of disbelief that is now part and parcel of any “Fast” movie’s DNA. And who can forget the time Letty herself came back from the dead with a bad case of amnesia?) “I wanted there to be some sort of significance in how he was going to be a part of the team and part of the family.”įamiliar faces have returned before to provide crucial exposition, like Eva Mendes’s “2 Fast 2 Furious"/"Fast Five” character Monica Fuentes, or as part of the extended Toretto family, like Tego Calderón’s Tego Leo and Don Omar’s Rico Santos, both introduced in the short “Los Bandoleros.” (Also back in “F9" is Shea Whigham’s FBI agent Stasiak, who worked with Paul Walker’s Brian five films ago. “I wanted to portray that side of Sean that he learned from Han, that he learned life lessons and wisdom,” said Black, who also hoped that bringing Sean back would feel organic to the plot. So when the idea of coming back for “F9" arose, Black spoke with Lin about his concerns for how his character was portrayed.
He’d been asked to return to reprise the role in 2017’s “Fate of the Furious” but says he felt the character would have been shoehorned in without good reason. It’s not the first franchise reappearance of a character from Han’s Tokyo days: Black made a brief cameo in 2015’s “ Furious 7,” opposite Diesel, in a scene set shortly after Han’s death in which Dom travels to Japan and Sean gives him the iconic Toretto cross necklace found in the wreckage. A decade and a half later they’re engineering experts whose latest automotive experiment - a rocket-powered 1984 Pontiac Fiero - plays a crucial role as “F9" hurtles toward new heights and Lin orchestrates his own “Tokyo Drift” reunion within “F9.” Reaching back into the past, “F9" retcons a long-lost Toretto brother named Jakob (John Cena), whose bitter history with Dom predates even 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious.”Īnd as the Toretto clan splits up to stop Jakob from acquiring world-threatening weapons tech, a side mission sends Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) to find a trio of rocket scientists who might help - rocket scientists who happen to be ex-Tokyo drifters Sean, Earl (Jason Tobin) and Twinkie (Shad “Bow Wow” Moss).īack in 2006, in the first “Fast” movie directed by Lin, they were car-crazy high school students in over their heads with the Yakuza.
With the final chapters of the “Fast” saga on the horizon, many roads seem to point to the origins of the franchise. Even as the actor who plays him, I’m like, ‘How did this happen?Īctor Sung Kang on the return of his “Fast” character, Han
Obviously, for each Fast race or Furious vehicle, the series has taken progressively weird – and cherished – exciting bends in the road as Dom and Brian went worldwide and turned out to be considerably more than just vehicle hustling devotees who additionally ended up having side gigs as moderately smalltime evildoers or cops.I can’t believe he’s back. A Fast Family! From that point the series headed off in a couple of odd headings, with the Diesel-less 2 Fast 2 Furious and the Walker-less The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift before the siblings were brought together eight years after the first for 2009’s Fast and Furious. Watch our Fast and the Furious timetable for the ordered story of Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto and Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner, who initially met in that experience as improbable partners who might proceed to frame… a family. The Fast and the Furious series has gotten truly convoluted throughout the long term, so it’s time back to outline the Fast course of events in sequential request, from 2001’s The Fast and the Furious right through the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off and the latest passage in the fundamental series, the Fate of the Furious from 2017… which obviously leads into the most recent film, Fast and the Furious 9, a.k.a.