With Fast and Furious 10 on the way, there’s nobody else we can imagine but Paul Walker in the role of Brian O’Conner — a cop turned fellow car racer and right-hand man to Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto. The pair’s relationship both on and off-screen was the heart and soul of the Fast and Furious movies, making it all the more tragic when Walker passed away in a car accident in 2013.
Fortunately, he was given a fitting and emotional send-off in Fast and Furious 7, with Brian O’Conner living a happy life off-screen as he chose to step away from the racing scene to spend more time with his family. Despite his untimely passing, Walker and the Fast and Furious character continue to live on the Fast and Furious universe, with the ninth movie ending with a blue Nissan Skyline (Brian’s favourite car) pulling up to join Toretto and the family for a dinner.
Yet, going back to the early 2000’s, there was more than one contender for the role of Brian O’Conner, meaning that the action movie series could have ended up looking incredibly different to how it does now.
This is because, as reported by Looper, Eminiem was a frontrunner for the role. However, the successful rap artist was busy making a film of his own — the gritty drama movie 8 Mile that would end up being acclaimed by both audiences and critics alike.
But, just because he turned down the role of Brian, that hasn’t stopped the thriller movie franchise from trying to get the star involved. As reported by Fuse, Eminem was approached to record a song for the seventh movie’s soundtrack. Again, he turned the opportunity down because he was involved in another movie around that time: Southpaw. He reportedly didn’t want to have two songs from two movies released at similar times competing with each other.
The song he turned down later became ‘See You Again’ by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth. Ultimately, although it would have been fun to see Eminem’s version of ‘See You Again’ and watch him as Brian O’Conner, we can’t imagine things turning out any differently than they did. And we wouldn’t want them to.