Paying tribute. Vin Diesel honored his late friend Paul Walker in a huge way, the Furious 7 actor revealed on the Today show on Monday, March 23.
“While I was in the hospital, the name that I will give you is… I named her… I named her Pauline,” an emotional Diesel, 47, told Today‘s Natalie Morales of his and girlfriend Paloma Jimenez‘s newborn baby girl.
The longtime couple named their daughter after Walker, welcoming the new addition earlier this month. Diesel and model Jimenez, 31, are already the parents to daughter Hania, 6, and son Vincent, 4.
“There’s no other person that I was thinking about as I was cutting this umbilical cord,” Diesel shared of Walker and his welcoming of the tiny tot. “I just thought… I knew he was there and it felt like, you know, a way to keep his memory a part of my family and a part of my world.”
The action star lost his close friend and costar in November 2013, when Walker died in a tragic car crash at the age of 40. Next month, the late star will make his final appearance in the Fast & Furious franchise, when Furious 7 hits theaters.
Walker was in the middle of the filming schedule for his Furious 7 scenes before his untimely death, and his brothers Cody and Caleb stepped in to finish his work.
The beloved actor was remembered by his Fast & Furious costars after his death, and just last week Diesel broke down while introducing the upcoming film at the South by Southwest film festival.
“This was a labor of love,” he told the crowd of Furious 7 as he teared up. “It was in some ways the hardest movie I ever had to do because the relationships that you see on film are so real. When the tragedy happened, I lost my best friend. I lost my brother.”
