Paul Walker’s brother has ruled out returning as a physical stand-in for his late sibling for the final Fast & Furious film, suggesting instead that artificial intelligence could be used to recreate the character.
Cody Walker, who helped complete 2015’s Furious 7 after his brother died during production, said the decision should ultimately rest with Paul Walker’s daughter Meadow, saying: “My stance is, it’s what Meadow wants to see done; it’s her father.”
“I would not be interested in doing that again. I love the way his character exited the franchise. They didn’t kill him off, they didn’t do something cheesy like that. It’s beautiful, [Brian] is off raising his kids,” Walker told Entertainment Weekly.
He continued: “But if they want to do that, if Meadow would like to see that, they don’t need me or Caleb. AI was not a thing back in 2014, so they could do that. There’s years of footage that was never used from these other Fast films. They’re the best in the business, they can figure that out.”
Walker, who played Brian O’Conner in the Fast & Furious franchise, died at the age of 40 in a car crash in Santa Clarita, California, on 30 November 2013, while Furious 7 was still being made.
The Los Angeles County coroner ruled that he died from a combination of traumatic and thermal injuries after the Porsche Carrera GT in which he was travelling crashed and caught fire, and his death was ruled an accident.
At the time, Cody and Caleb Walker, along with actor John Brotherton, stood in for Walker during the remaining production, while visual-effects artists reconstructed his appearance using footage and digital effects.
As a result, instead of killing off Walker’s character, the film saw Brian separating from Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and choosing family life with Mia (Jordana Brewster) and their children.
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The forthcoming film, Fast Forever, is expected to bring the long-running franchise to a close. Diesel said last year that he wanted the final film to bring Brian back into the fold.
“The studio said to me, ‘Vin, can we please have the finale of Fast & Furious [in] April 2027?’ I said, ‘Under three conditions,’” he told Vanity Fair in 2025. “The first is to bring the franchise back to LA. The second thing was to return to the car, to the street racing. The third thing was reuniting Dom and Brian O’Conner. That is what you’re going to get in the finale.”
At a 25th-anniversary screening of The Fast and the Furious at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, an emotional Diesel talked about Walker, saying: “It’s so hard for me to watch it because there’s so many moments in this movie that you see, that I see differently.”
“The scene that you see, I see the moment Pablo told me he had a one-year-old daughter,” he added, referring to Walker by the nickname “Pablo”.
The franchise began with The Fast and the Furious in 2001, following undercover police officer Brian O’Conner investigating a group of Los Angeles street racers led by Dominic Toretto.
The series has since expanded to 11 feature films, including the spin-off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and has gone on to make more than $7bn (£5.18bn) at the global box office.