Forty Years Old in Valencia

Paul Walker was forty years old. He died on November 30, 2013, in Valencia, California, as a passenger in a red Porsche Carrera GT driven by his friend Roger Rodas. Witnesses said the car was moving fast, hit a lamp post and a tree, and caught fire immediately. He had just left a charity event—an auto show raising money for survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, which had devastated the Philippines three weeks earlier. He’d founded Reach Out Worldwide after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, and it had grown into a real disaster relief operation by the time he died.

The Fast & Furious films were never serious cinema, and Walker wasn’t trying to be anyone’s idea of an actor’s actor—but that’s exactly what made him watchable. He had an ease on screen that more technically accomplished performers spend entire careers trying to find. Brian O’Conner, the character he played across most of the franchise, was essentially a decent man navigating an increasingly absurd world, and Walker played that without condescension or visible effort. It fit him like the role had been cut to his measurements.

There’s something difficult to sit with in the specific shape of this death: a man walking out of a fundraiser for disaster victims, dying in a car crash at forty, one of the most beloved franchises of the decade suddenly incomplete around him. The seventh film was mid-production. Rest in peace, Paul Walker.