Recently, Vin Diesel became emotional during a screening of Fast and Furious as part of the Cannes Classics segment. What made him break down in tears is that it reminded him of his longtime friend and Fast and Furious co-star, Paul Walker. The moment became viral, with its video clip being shared widely on social media.
Earlier this Sunday, Diesel shared a long post, where he looked back at the virality of the moment and one of the early incidents from his life that brought him close with Walker.
"This week, I sat in a studio meeting where someone said, with real and earned pride, that our Cannes Classics screening was the most viral Universal had gone in years. I understand why that’s a victory... But you know how it goes, someone tells you one thing with an expected reaction, and your mind drifts somewhere else entirely, into its own private share of memory," Diesel wrote.
The actor added, "Mine drifted into that strange, surreal moment of sorrow at the end of the viral Cannes screening. Seeing my brother on screen, handing me the keys, in a scene I remember like yesterday. The applause stopped. The room went quiet. The eyes turned to me. And I couldn’t stop the single tear that acted alone and decided to drop…"
Vin Diesel then reminisced about an incident from 2010 that helped cement his lifelong bond with Walker. "In 2010, an earthquake tore open the island of Hispaniola. I was asked, by their president, to go in and walk the streets of Haiti, to show strength… and to call everyone I knew and beg them to help, to stand beside people who had lost everything to
something no one could have stopped. The only person who answered the call was Pablo…"
Walker's gesture moved Diesel, making him realise that he met someone with a shared interest in philanthropy. As Diesel added, "Afterwards, he asked me what I thought about him starting an organization, because he had seen the need with his own eyes. He even asked me what he should call it. In that moment, we became eternal brothers… not over a movie, accolades or records broken, but over a shared recognition of compassion for the forsaken."
Diesel also contextualised Walker and his compassion for humanity with the recent earthquake in Venezuela. The actor added, "So while in that room I heard his voice again. To the studio, our industry, out of nowhere… I asked the only question that mattered… What are we doing for this week’s victims of a natural disaster?
Right now, on another stretch of that same region, families are being pulled from the rubble of back-to-back earthquakes. Strangers are arriving with their own shovels. Rescuers from countries far away are climbing into broken buildings for children whose names they will
never learn. Keep Venezuela in your thoughts.
Because there will come a day, maybe not in mine, maybe in
your children’s lifetime, when the grace and beauty of the forsaken will come to rescue you. Grace moves in both directions. It always finds its way home."
