“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all of the fun and all of the magic that we had going before Paul Walker’s untimely death, the trauma of losing him superseded all of that,” Gibson tells hosts Derek Lawrence and Chanelle Berlin Johnson on the latest episode of EW’s BINGE: The Fast Saga.
Gibson and Walker’s relationship began over a decade earlier, when The Fast and the Furious star Vin Diesel and director Rob Cohen decided not to return for 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious; so the Baby Boy team of Gibson and Oscar-nominated filmmaker John Singleton stepped in.
It’s really going to feel like a two-hander; it’s never going to feel like it’s about you or it’s just about him.’ Everything about us and our banter and our true collaboration with 2 Fast, it was a plan that we came up with, like, I don’t want to upstage you, you’re not on a mission to upstage me.
Starring in 2 Fast was set to only be the second major role for the singer-turned-actor, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t “trying to tap into whatever had done,” which is why they veered into humor with Roman.
“If Vin ever does it again, if you become this carbon copy of Vin, then Vin is going to be like, ‘Well, why would I ever want to do a movie with a dude who basically came in with deep voices and just all of the things that kind of represent the blueprint of Diesel?'” explains Gibson of the original thinking behind the character.
Fast Five was the Avengers before the Avengers, uniting stars from every Fast movie, including Diesel, Walker, Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordan Brewster, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot.
“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.
“Seven is special because we were saying goodbye to somebody we love who was there from the jump,” says Michelle Rodriguez on the second Furious 7 episode of EW’s BINGE: The Fast Saga.
In addition to a possible Brian inclusion, returning director Justin Lin is bringing out all the stops for what he’s deemed the best Fast film yet, from outer space to Dom’s long-lost brother .
To listen, subscribe to EW’s BINGE: The Fast Saga feed via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
As that icon once said, “The most important thing in life will always be the people in this zoo right here right now.’ And for me, that’s the Dom to my Brian, the Letty to my Mia, the Roman to my Tej, the Giselle to my Han, Chanelle Berlin Johnson.
If there’s one interview of these that I would recommend going and watching the actual video of it would be of the Michelle chat.
And obviously, we’re going to talk a lot about his relationship with Paul Walker, going back to 2 Fast, since Furious 7 there’s so many things about this movie, we love it for so many reasons, but it’s really because of its significance in saying goodbye to Paul and to the character of Brian O’Conner.
And then Tyrese, 2 Fast & Furious was my favorite in the franchise, until Fast Five happened, so to get to talk to the person who was, obviously, a huge part of that, and stepped into this character that’s become so important to the energy and the humor of the franchise, was really great.
With both of them, you could feel that emotion, anytime the conversation ended up around Paul and around what happened to him and Furious 7, it was tough.
I mean, go back and check out all seven parts before this, we’re now on Furious 7, so we’ve done six movies before this.
We’ve been starting all of these off, Dominic Toretto once said, he lives his life a quarter mile at a time.
Well, I mean, I have more bad memories than good man, because all of the fun and all of the magic that we had going before, Paul Walker’s untimely death was…
They couldn’t make a deal with Vin, for him to do the sequel, and then once they couldn’t make a deal with Vin, that’s one of the director, Rob Cohen, kind of fell off because they did part one as a duo.
because I was like, “I’m ‘stepping’ in to this opportunity that was supposed to be for Vin,” and if I had watched part one, then I would have probably found myself trying to tap into whatever he had did in part one.
And Paul Walker, man, I mean, I get emotional when I think about this guy for damn near three movies, he kept begging and pleading and trying to talk to the studio and directors and Vin, “Well, we got to get Tyrese.
I obviously, have watched the movies, but when it’s time for the movies to come out with doing seven, eight premiers and seven, eight different countries, we’ll sit there, you’ll watch 20, 30% of each movie get bits and pieces.
That makes a lot of sense.
I remember I went and had a meeting with James Wan, and I really wanted to sit him down in a real way and just say to him, “Look, man, don’t ever repeat this, but these are all of the people, here all of the characters, here’s all of the politics and backstories, when somebody does this, this is what it means when somebody says this, look out for that.” And I had a Phil Jackson moment with him, and I’m sure James Wan will confirm it, where I had to pull him into the huddle and really break some shit down and say, “This is what this world is, and this is what you’re doing.
Do you remember reading the script? Something, as a fan, were always like excited to see, what’s the next level that you guys go to and the stunts? Do you remember reading…
And then I’m able to get in there and fully focused on the things that I’m supposed to do, and the things that I think are corny and goofy and don’t make sense, “Nah, I would never say that I would never do that.” And so what happens is when they send me the script, I have this thing called a PDF Ripper, because it’s always sent to me as a PDF.
Because another thing that happens with me is I get to the set, I’m like, “Okay, so this is the car.” And it’s very impulsive, like, “Okay, so you come in and go where you get in the car with me.” And I’m able to listen to everything that we supposed to do, even though I read it, and that’s where I find the funny, that’s where I discover the humor.
No, no, no, listen, man, they tell him that he party like this every day.
I mean, you were probably the first one, you know what I mean? 2 Fast, you come in, Luda comes in, and then, on down the line, whether it’s Gal or Sung or Dwayne, on this one, it was Statham, who you’d worked with on Death Race, and obviously, he adds some real gravitas, too, to the film here.
And we also had a lot of fun on the set of Transformers three, because he was popping up all the time to be with his girl Rosie, so that’s when I really caught a great vibe with him.
Talking to everybody, it seems like with you working with Jason in Death Race, and then seeing him on Transformers three, but also like you had worked with Justin Lin on Annapolis and Jordana was in that movie, and Sung told us the other day that when he booked Tokyo Drift, that he, ran into Jason Statham and like mentioned like, “Oh, I’m in this movie.” And he was like, “Oh, that’s crazy, you’re going to be in Tokyo Drift.” And then they end up, in this franchise later, Jason joins it.
And I had never worked with the Rock before Fast Five, but us meeting each other cold Turkey on the set, he’s a good guy and all we do is laugh and crack jokes and have fun.
Man, when are you going to see my family? If I live in Barstow, is anybody ever going to meet my mom? Anybody ever going to see my brothers, sisters family, and when does Roman get a little backstory? So it’s been cool to finally have a girl in the mix that we can kind of fight and argue over our little banter.
He’s in front of the computer and he’s saying all these big fancy words, and he’s made a pivot, and thank God they gave him that dialogue.
Someone’s got to do it, better him than you, for sure.
So when I got to the set, me and John Singleton, rest in peace, had just did Baby Boy, and he gave me my first gig.
And I remember John kept saying to me, “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make Paul feel safe, where it’s really going to feel like a two-hander.
This shit is really about us saying, “Some way, somehow there’s a sequel to this thing, and how about we just do the best we can to make it great.” Now the movie might come out and it may bomb, because they wanted to see Vin and Paul and not my black ass, but ultimately, we came into it, and we said, “Bro, I got you.
That reminds me of…
And there’s literally been dialogue and lines, where if I’m honest with myself, I would say, “That sounds like some that Dom would say to Brian, Roman wouldn’t say that to Dom.” And you got to be clear about your message, your dialogue, and your real estate.
And when you find just trying to force yourself into somebody else’s real estate, using somebody else’s lines or dialogue, or doing scenes that belong to somebody else, the fans that’s watching the movie are going to say, “That was an awkward moment,” because they’ve mastered these characters.
I’m tired of blah, blah, blah.” He said, “Okay, Roman.” “Well, I wasn’t thinking about doing that now.” You know what I’m saying? I’m not trying to really jump into that, I was just saying, I don’t just speaking up.
I mean, I wasn’t trying to get into the whole leadership thing, like now, you know what I’m saying? I was just kind of talking about like, at some point, like, you know, when we…
When I asked you to sum up the movie at the top, obviously, painful was one of the things you mentioned.
I mean, the first thing that got all of us were struggling with was, what the hell are we doing here? What’s Fast & the Furious without Paul? Are we going to come off as just a bunch of narcissists? That’s like, moving and proceeding and just deciding that whatever Paul is and whatever he meant to the franchise, are we going to appear to be a bunch of people that’s going to say like, “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.
And if you know him and love him the way we did, then you would understand that there’s a lot of really bad people in the world.
I was just like constantly calling and checking on everyone, and always, I mean, I would be, it felt like I was at Vin house for days, days upon days, weeks upon weeks.
Hard to make a turn from that, but kind of getting towards the end here, we’ll just wrap up with a few, what we call the final lap or a few rapid-fire fast questions.
I know there was some conversations about Denzel Washington coming, which would have been, obviously, the high of all highs for me, because I wouldn’t be here as an actor, if it wasn’t for Denzel.
I’m grateful to Vin, because in the world of Fast and the Furious, Vin’s got all the power, and as we have the Charlize Therons and Jason Stathams and Djimon Hounsous and all of these people, they got to go run all this shit by Vin.
And we’ve just done a great job of diversifying and making sure that people can go to this movie and see somebody in the movie that represents them or their region or their country or their religion or their nationality.
Yeah.
Well, there was multiple conversations about a Roman and Tej spin-off, but I kept turning it down, because truth is, I didn’t want to make the franchise about me.
But there’s just going to be a lot of stuff that people are going to see from our characters and our maturity and our vulnerabilities that people have never seen before.
I mean, the fact that Dom and his brother, it’s like, well, what happens when your brother come around? That’s a vulnerability and a place that you would never seen Dominic Toretto go.
Like I said, it’s a great movie, and I know, sometimes a tough one to talk about, so we appreciate you doing that with us.
I used to say, I live my life a quarter mile at a time, and I think that’s why we were brothers, because you did too.
Thank you again to both Michelle Rodriguez and Tyrese Gibson, even eight years later, I know it’s not easy to revisit such a painful period in their lives.
We start with our old favorite, which is, as Brian says in Fast one, “If I win, I take the money and the respect to some people that’s more important.” Well, he won Dom’s respect, but it’s now time for us to decide who wins our respect for Furious 7.
Everything that’s working against them, not just dealing with the emotion of that tragedy of losing Paul, but then they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to move forward and actually finish this.” Okay.
I don’t know if I’m a glutton for punishment, but that’s the thing, it doesn’t even feel like, you don’t even feel sad.
So the miracle of just that scene and then the whole movie itself even existing and being finished, that’s credit and respect to everyone, with a special shout out to James Wan.
I think on top of that too, to be able to pivot what the ending was or how the movie wraps up, because they had shot some of it, but not a bunch of other parts, is they, also, in figuring out how to just tie this movie up, have to do it in a way that’s satisfactory for fans too.
So it’s overwhelming in a great way, because it’s like, who knew what to expect going into seeing this movie, how you would feel about it, how well they could pull it off.
Probably what really speaks to how incredible this ending is and what a great job they did is, the second time I went to see this, I went with my brothers who are big fans of Fast, then I went in my sister, my younger sister who had never seen one Fast movie.
the final scene plays, cuts to credits, lights come on, I look at her sitting next to me, she was bawling.
This movie, even though it has this sort of heaviness to it because of what happens with Paul Walker, it’s still full of humor, adventure, fun.
I also love, obviously, from that plane scene, which is, as they continue to up the ante and the stunts, Tej saying, “Roman, you need some fresh air? Because you’re about to get a whole lot of it.” Without telling what exactly they’re about to do.
I don’t actually know if I have a favorite.
And I really like the, “Daddy’s got to go to work,” and “Woman, I am the cavalry,” just on paper, those probably wouldn’t belong, but it’s just the way The rock delivers them.
And it’s hard, what do we have, five or six different characters, just highlighted and those, so kind of everyone gets like a great line, at least one in the movie.
I also had one that just occurred to me, not even a line, but a series of lines, is when Ramsey is sort of describing everybody in the group, very memorable all the time, because she, she nails it.
So next up we go to, which Oscars should Fast have been nominated for? And just pulling back the curtain, this is the movie that inspired this as a category on the show.
If I’m remembering correctly, because I feel like I remember being appalled over that, which I would have been appalled no matter who won.
As we just mentioned in the respect category, what they pulled off and what they needed to do with special effects, they had to really kind of almost invent special effects for this film, and nothing there either.
It’s incredible.
Another thought I had though, is that I remember also there were reports that originally they had tried to go to Eminem to do the song for this movie, but he turned it down, and we all know of course Eminem did win the Oscar before for original song.
But, yeah, that’s an interesting thing, because I mean, obviously, I’m glad, I’ve liked a lot of Eminem’s music and I’m a fan of his, but I don’t know that that would have fit.
And on some of these, people could probably say we’re stretching, in the past where we were like, “Come on, Sung Kang wasn’t going to get nominated for best supporting actor.
But this one, no, you can’t argue that See You Again should have been nominated for best original song, so sorry, I’m not, I’m not listening to anything there.
It’s like, he plays it perfectly, where he sort of above the chaos, but also, very much someone who is involved with these people, really respects them.
And, I mean, he’s Kurt Russell, but he walks in, and this is true, and we’ll talk about this on the Fate of the Furious episode, like Charlize Theron, he walks in and he knows exactly what movie he’s in.
So, yeah, totally, I think just introducing Kurt Russell, basically, as the white Nick Fury is the heat check of Furious 7, and I’m all here for it.
I like when an actor, you can just tell they’re having a great time.
He was really curious about our family and how Kate and Oliver were doing and Wyatt.” So I like to imagine that that’s what happens when Kurt’s done for the day over at Fast.
Yeah, I think, well, the most hype at the time was Iggy Azalea.
And they were like, “Hey, do you want to get in on this?” And he was like, “Yeah, sure.” So why not? He ends up in the movie.
But probably the most surprising, and I think it’s because we have, obviously, Jason Statham’s character set up is kind of the big bad revenge plot, is getting Djimon Hounsou in the movie as well, who’s like the secondary villain, almost.
It’s just, I mean, obviously we’re not going to complain about having him in the movie, but it is kind of weird, like you said, Statham’s the main bad guy and Hounsou’s kind of there as his Jakande character, we don’t really have much context for him or really getting the actual in depth explanation about his character.
Any Oscar winners we’ll take them in Fast, just helps the brand.
I mean, we’ve talked so much about the ending, so we don’t have to really dive further into that, but I mean, that’s kind of, you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Wow, Holy…
So you’re like, okay, you kind of know that’s coming, but they didn’t show you, and then you see in the movie, that, no, it’s not just the one, they’re going to a third skyscraper.
And then the third one, for me, was Brian running up that semi-truck as it was about to go over the cliff, because, again, remember, going into this movie, as long as you didn’t like read spoilers or anything, you don’t know, you’re like, what are they going to do with this Brian character? How are they going to say goodbye to him? How are they going to write him out? You’re like, could they kill the character? Could that possibly happen? And then, so any scene you’re sitting there like watching him, this truck he’s trying to get off of is falling off of a cliff, and then he’s just running and barely jumps off just in time.
Even with that scene, too, I feel like the script sort of inadvertently nods to it, because you could just have that moment after where Letty’s, like, “You good?” Or, “You okay?” Or whatever she says, and it’s like, yes, we’re all taking a moment to breathe that Brian did not die.
Now, speaking of the final sequence, obviously, that was pretty dramatic, for a lot of reasons, but then there’s a lot of dramatic moments throughout this movie.
And as Michelle talked about, she’s down for action and stuff, it’s like sort of the big, emotional, romantic beats that don’t come as naturally to her, but she sells it.
If we wouldn’t have gotten that scene and that final moment between Brian and Mia, because I’m not going to really count the beach for them, because it’s like, they’re kind of far off, we don’t get to actually hear them say anything to each other.
But just to have that phone call and have them tie it all the way back to the beginning of this franchise and this relationship.
It ends up sort of, even though, obviously, he survives, it just sort of ties up emotionally, a lot of things, you sort of need to be able to say goodbye to the character, and thank goodness he does not die, narratively.
that’s what you’re going to think of when you think of Furious 7, Paul’s passing and you know what they did there at the end to send him off.
Vin talked to us about it all the way back when we were talking about the first movie, it’s like, he was always the one that was like pushing it, the biggest fan of the franchise, and what it meant to people and the impact that it could have.
And they were able to both create a movie that I think just honors him so perfectly, but also is such a gift to fans too.
They’re like, what are people going to think? Are they going to be able to spot, oh, hey, that’s not Paul, that’s special effects or whatever? And he said, what he was blown away from him, he said, some kids actually came up to him afterwards and just thanked him.
And he’s like, “I knew we needed this for ourselves,” but he’s like, “I didn’t realize that the fans needed that closure too.” And so, I guess we all won for getting some closure in an impossible situation, so that’s really, I feel like the proper winner there.
But like Brian O’Conner, we hope we earned your respect today, and that you keep listening to EWs BINGE of the Fast Saga, when next week we’re joined by Ramsey, yes, Nathalie Emmanuel.
I feel so lucky still that we’ve gotten to do this podcast, and I’m so hyped for F9, but yeah, it’ll be unfortunate that we have to say goodbye.
And speaking of special episodes, be ready, we’ll have multiple F9 episodes, too, so be ready.
This episode was hosted and produced by Derek Lawrence and Chanelle Berlin Johnson.