Grab the nearest box of tissues. The first trailer for I Am Paul Walker was released on Thursday, July 26, as the fifth anniversary of the late actor’s death approaches.
The two-minute teaser for the upcoming Paramount Network and Network Entertainment documentary begins with a home video of a 15-year-old Walker smiling for the camera and looking handsome as ever. “He was a big kid,” his younger brother Cody Walker recalls with an equally big grin.
“He liked to go fast,” sister Ashlie Walker reminisces with a laugh. “[As] soon as I was old enough to hang on tight, I was on the back of his Big Wheel with him, going for the ride of my light.”
Growing up, Paul did not dream of becoming a big movie star in Hollywood. “He would always say, like, ‘I wanted to be a park ranger. You know, make $28-grand a year and, like, live in the wilderness,’” brother Caleb Walker recounts. “That’s really what he wanted to do.”
But that all changed when Paul’s film career started with a small role in the 1986 horror comedy Monster in the Closet. Fifteen years later, he found his breakthrough role as Brian O’Connor in The Fast and the Furious, in which he starred alongside Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez. Paul would go on to star in six movies in the action franchise, making his final appearance in 2015’s Furious 7.
“If you loved him the way we did, you would say, ‘Why him and not us?’” Paul’s close friend and Fast costar Tyrese Gibson says in the trailer.
Paul and his friend Roger Rodas were killed in a single-car accident in Santa Clarita, California, in November 2013. The actor was 40 years old. A subsequent investigation found that Rodas’ 2005 Porsche Carrera GT was traveling between 80 and 93 mph in a 45-mph speed zone.
In September 2015, Paul’s daughter, Meadow, now 19, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Porsche, claiming her father was wearing a faulty seatbelt and that the car had other design defects. The suit was settled in October 2017 under confidential terms. Meadow, whom the movie star shared with ex Rebecca Soteros, had previously been awarded $10.1 million in a settlement from Rodas’ estate.
I Am Paul Walker premieres on Paramount Network on Saturday, August 11, at 9 p.m. ET.
