Exploring the Romantic Tales of the Fast and Furious Stars

Vin Diesel’s $37M Shared Universe Failure Raises Big Questions About His Future After Fast & Furious Ends

June 24, 2024

Here’s How to Watch Every Fast and Furious Movie In Order, Including Fast X

June 23, 2024

After 20 years of Dom and Letty exchanging soulful gazes or best buds Roman and Tej figuring out one epic motor-vehicle hack after another, it can be easy to forget that the actors who play these characters don’t spend all their time together.

Because in addition to wildly over-the-top driving sequences, the Fast & Furious saga really runs on the theme of family—”by blood or by bond”—so we’ve all got love and brotherhood on the brain now that Fast X is in theaters.

Happily, they’ve also been known to reunite off-plot for weddings, their kids’ play dates and other good times. Ludacris recently told Insider that his Not to mention, the sprawling cast will always be bonded by their billion-dollar box office, a job well done.

But at the end of the day, close as they may be, Vin Diesel and his co-stars scatter to different homes, separate (gulp) cars and their own personal lives.

And with 10 movies so far—the franchise is slated for an 11th lap in 2025—and a lot of different stars zipping in and out of the timeline, often defying the laws of biology and physics, that’s a lot of personal life to keep track of.

So scroll on to see who the stars of Fast & Furious films past and present have chosen to go off-roading with:

For a star of multiple action franchises, Dom, er, Groot, er… Diesel (whose real name is Mark Sinclair) has managed to lead a pretty private life with longtime partner Paloma Jiménez. They’re parents to daughters Hania Riley, 15, and Pauline, 8, and son Vincent, 12—who, incidentally, made his movie debut playing young Dom Toretto in 2021’s Fast 9. Pauline is named in honor of Fast star Paul Walker, who died in 2013. While Jiménez, and sometimes the whole family, has been known to join him on the occasional red carpet, Diesel tends to keep a tight lid on their home life—though, if asked, he won’t deny the truth. “I’m speechless,” he told Entertainment Tonight at the xXx: Return of Xander Cage premiere in 2017 when asked his thoughts on just how amazing Jiménez looked that night. “She’s so stunningly beautiful.” And, he continued, noting how beautiful she was on the inside as well, “She’s my rock…She’s everything,” including “the perfect mother.”

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As Dom’s ride-or-die Letty since 2001’s The Fast and the Furious—through presumed death, amnesia and domestic disagreements over bucolic retirement vs. adrenaline-boosting excitement—Rodriguez stealthily became one of the most bad-ass action heroes around. The actress appears to be riding solo lately, but her dating history includes Zac Efron and Cara Delevingne, and in recent years she was at least friends with Olivier Martinez. “I have absolutely nothing consistent in my life,” Rodriguez told Milla Jovovich for Interview magazine in 2015. “But that’s where serendipity comes in and I love that. One day I’m going to have to sacrifice that to bring life into the world. But the more I can hold off on that, the happier I’ll be. “It’s scary for me,” she continued. “I’m a lone wolf. I run by myself on most things. I’ve got lots of really great friends, but the thought of being in a long-lasting relationship? Psh, I couldn’t last more than six months with somebody, let alone have a father figure around for a kid. I mean, if I could give a kid a father figure, that would be amazing.” Ultimately, she wanted “that unconditional love,” Rodriguez said, “the kind you get with a family member,” and she thought that was more likely to come from a child. “You might get lucky enough to find that unconditional love in a friend or a lover,” the actress noted, “but it’s very rare.”

So as not to devastate the onscreen family, Dom’s sister Mia Toretto has remained happily paired off with Walker’s Brian O’Conner since they got out of the game in Furious 7. And fans were happy to picture Brian home with the kids when Mia got back into the game in F9. Brewster married investment company exec Mason Morfit on Sept. 3, 2022, in Santa Barbara, Calif., with a handful of four-wheeled guests from Fast & Furious on display and Diesel, Ludacris and Paul’s daughter Meadow Walker in attendance. She is also mom to sons Julian, 9, and Rowan, 6, with ex-husband Andrew Form. “In my 20s and most of my 30s, I second-guessed every move or decision I made,” Brewster wrote in a 2021 Glamour essay, reflecting on the end of her first marriage and finding love again. “In my 40s, I know what I value and am proud of decisions I can make on my own. My newfound security helps my kids in the long run. I know that in my heart. I also feel like I finally have a partner.”

The rapper-actor has taken seven turns as computer whiz Tej and even got to drive a car into space because, sure why not. But the artist born Chris Bridges stays rooted in Atlanta with model wife Eudoxie Mbouguiengue, who he dated for five years before they wed in Costa Rica in 2014. They have daughter Cadence, 7, and son Chance, 22 months, together, and Bridges is dad to daughter Karma, 21, and Cai Bella, 9, from previous relationships. “Join Me In Wishing A Happy Mother’s Day AND BIRTHDAY To The Most Incredible Human Being Walking On Planet Earth,” he wrote in tribute to Mbouguiengue in a May 14 Instagram post. “Where You Walk Is Holy Ground & Where You Talk Is Holy Sound! We Thank God For You EVERYDAY but today I’m Piling The Gifts On BIG…Love You Mrs BOSS Bridges”

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It was a Roman holiday for Gibson and girlfriend Zelie Timothy at the Fast X premiere in the Italian capital. The actor and singer brought now 15-year-old daughter Shayla, from his first marriage, to the F9 premiere in 2021. He’s also dad to 2-year-old daughter Soraya with ex Samantha Lee. The pair announced in 2020 they were divorcing (and he was detailing his reaction to ongoing child support proceedings on Instagram this past April). But amid that turmoil, Gibson has found peace with Timothy, who he met after sliding into her DMs more than two years ago. “I don’t remember exactly what my pickup line was, but I sent her a DM, and I just remember complimenting her,” he told People in October 2022. “When I got on the phone to talk to her, one of the things that was shocking was she just had such a sweetness. Her energy was just so soft-spoken.”

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Really, who needs James Bond when Statham is a real person? After first popping up in 2013’s Fast & Furious 6 (albeit in a call-back to Tokyo Drift), he’s walked both sides of the ally-nemesis line as Deckard Shaw—and of course the heroes prefer him on their side. Meanwhile, the English actor has had Rosie Huntington-Whiteley‘s back for more than a decade, welcoming son Jack in June 2017 and daughter Isabella in February 2022. The super-private-yet-hard-to-miss couple got engaged in 2016, but Huntington-Whiteley has said since that they weren’t in any rush to the altar. And they certainly weren’t letting a piece of paper get in the way of life unfolding as they saw fit. “We’ve been so focused on our work for long and Jack came along, we definitely talk about it,” the model told Extra in 2017. “We’re looking forward to that time. It’s also not a huge priority for us. We’re so happy.” Statham is “very hands-on, he’s a brilliant dad,” she said. “I am very lucky, he’s a great partner.”

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Well, at least Hobbs’ hulking presence was fun while it lasted. A devoted single father in the Fast universe, Johnson is also a girl dad in this life to Jasmine, 7, and Tiana, 5, with wife Lauren Hashian and 21-year-old Simone with ex Dany Garcia. Hashian “embodies what I believe are the two most important things in the world, which is love and kindness,” Johnson, who also enjoys a famously amicable professional relationship with Garcia, told E! News in 2022. “So, I’m a lucky man, in that I have a great relationship with my daughters, and that they have incredible influences with their moms.”

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The star of 2006’s Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift kept busy between then and his return to the franchise in 2021’s F9 (aside from a cameo in Furious 7): He married lawyer Maggie O’Brien in 2010 and they have three children together. After exiting NCIS: New Orleans in 2019, Black explained that he left the hit show to refocus on his family and their faith. “You realize the responsibilities you have as a husband and a father,” he told The Marriage Adventure in 2020. “There were times I felt like I couldn’t field those responsibilities because of my job. And I couldn’t focus on them as much as I wanted to. There was a lot of prayer about how to be a husband and father in the way this industry works and is run. For me, I just felt like no matter how hard I tried to stay on God’s pace and slow things down, to keep work at work and be a husband and father at home, it was hard to do. How the entertainment industry is run makes it difficult to do that. I’ve observed that over the years.”

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Han was such a fan-favorite, he was written back from the dead to resume his rightful place in the family in Fast 9. (Also, no one would have ever really accepted Shaw otherwise.) Kang—who first played Han in the 2002 crime drama Better Luck Tomorrow and director Justin Lin transplanted him into The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—keeps his private life exactly that, but the Internet has identified his wife as Miki Yim. Of returning to the fold years after Han was seemingly killed off, Kang told the Los Angeles Times in 2021, “It’s emotional—it feels like I’m going back to a family reunion.” And ahead of the premiere of Fast X, he told Autoweek it’s “a film that I want to share with people that I love—my friends and my family, my car friends, my personal family, people that don’t know anything about cars, right?”

Forever pouring one out for Han’s love Gisele… But in happier news, Gadot has been married to Jaron Varsano since 2008 and they have daughters Alma, 11, Maya, 6, and Daniella, 22 months, together. He was a real estate developer in their native Israel but he teamed up with his Wonder Woman wife to start production company Pilot Waves when they moved to L.A. Varsano and their two eldest girls all had cameos in Wonder Woman 1984 and Gadot was pregnant with their youngest during reshoots. “I couldn’t have done my movie without the support of my amazing family,” she told Good Day DC, “and to have them captured in the film with me meant a lot. An amazing, amazing souvenir that we will cherish forever.”

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Since making her debut as Shaw’s cool criminal mum Queenie with a cameo in The Fate of the Furious, the Oscar winner has stolen every one of her scenes. Mirren’s been married to director Taylor Hackford since 1997, but in the 1970s she taught her boyfriend Liam Neeson how to drive. “It’s very hard to unpick you choices,” Mirren told AARP in 2016 about finding Mr. Right. “A lot of it was luck, but a lot of it was choice, absolutely. Yes, I did very consciously choose my work over my relationships right up to the time that I met Taylor. I was 38 when I met Taylor, pretty late in life.” And they got married “in the end,” she explained, “because we realized that we were going to be together forever. We got married, ultimately, for legal reasons more than anything else—estate planning and other complicated things like that. And our families, we sensed, wanted us to be married. I always said I have nothing against marriage; it just wasn’t to my taste, like turnips. It took me a very long time to come round to acquiring the taste. I just had to meet the right turnip.”

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Tej and Roman have been fighting over Ramsey since Furious 7 and she’s been having a fine time teasing them both. Emmanuel, however, is taken, having been linked to British actor Alex Lanipekun for several years. While she keeps mum on her own private life, she did tell GQ in 2015 that if she could date a Game of Thrones character, it would be Robb Stark. “He kind of, fundamentally, is a good guy,” she mused, “and he was avenging his father…and he married the woman he loved despite what his family told him. So he does what he believes in and I like people that do that.” At the time, when it came to meeting people, she enjoyed “talking to somebody new,” so meeting for lunch made for a perfectly good date. Overall, she advised, “Don’t date a guy who’s intimidated by your power…You need someone who’s going to encourage you to exercise that and to blossom and kind of grow.”

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It isn’t hard to figure out why the franchise wanted Theron to play the villainous Cipher. Behind the scenes, the Oscar winner is mom to her daughters Jackson, 11, and August, 7. She was in a long relationship with Stuart Townsend and then dated Sean Penn for several years, but Us Weekly recently reported that she’s been seeing model and brand consultant Alex Dimitrijevic for a few months. Theron told Harper’s Bazaar for its October 2022 issue that she was single but had experienced a “deep dive into a relationship” during the pandemic. “And I was just like, I don’t know if I wanna. … I just feel so out of practice,” she said.

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The concept of family wasn’t doing much for Jakob Toretto at first in Fast 9, but by the end… Dom and Mia had their brother (the blood kind!) back. About 18 months after he and fellow WWE star Nikki Bella ended their six-year relationship, Cena quietly married Shay Shariatzadeh in October 2020. “Some things are worth keeping to yourself,” Cena said on TODAY while promoting Fast X, explaining, “We have core values which we both believe in, and one of those is keeping our information to us and those extremely close to our inner circle.” He added, “I couldn’t be happier, but I think a way for us to keep our intimacy is by keeping it intimate.”

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A newcomer to the franchise with Fast X, and a welcome addition at that. Momoa was famously partnered with Lisa Bonet for 12 years and then married to her for four before they announced they were splitting up in January 2021. They’re parents to Lola, 15, and son Nakoa-Wolf, 14, and Momoa still shows up for former stepdaughter Zoë Kravitz, taking the kids to the premiere of The Batman in 2022 when Bonet couldn’t make it. “We’re just so proud,” the Aquaman star told Entertainment Tonight of Kravitz’s turn as Selina Kyle/Catwoman. “Lisa couldn’t be here so we’re representing, me and the babies. We’re very excited to just be here…It’s still family, you know.”

Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Universal Pictures

Godfather Vin Diesel walked Paul Walker’s only daughter down the aisle when she married Louis Thornton-Allan in October 2021. Meadow was 2 when The Fast and the Furious came out, and now the 24-year-old has a cameo in Fast X. Aside from having movie stars at their wedding, she and Thornton-Allan have been enjoying a fairly low-key romance, celebrating each other publicly with simple Instagram captions such as “best friend,” “husband” and “Always proud.”

Exploring the Romantic Tales of the Fast and Furious Stars

Vin Diesel’s $37M Shared Universe Failure Raises Big Questions About His Future After Fast & Furious Ends

Here’s How to Watch Every Fast and Furious Movie In Order, Including Fast X

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