Whether you're a Fast and Furious fan who needs a refresher on how Dom went from living
his life a quarter mile at a time to thwarting acts of terrorism, or someone who has never
watched a Fast film but is curious to learn more about the franchise's central character,
we've got you covered.
Dominic was one of three Toretto children that we know of, alongside his sister Mia
and brother Jacob. He grew up in Los Angeles, where his family owned and operated Toretto's
Market & Cafe, while his father also worked as a professional stock car driver.
Along with his love of cars, Dom also inherited his father's religious faith and devotion
to friends and family. When Dom was young, he helped his father rebuild a 1970 Dodge
Charger RT, which he would continue to drive and cherish well into adulthood.
"Me and my dad built her. 900 horses of Detroit muscle."
At some point, Dom's father was killed during a race, after being run off the track by a
driver named Kenny Linder. Dom witnessed the accident, which killed his father instantly
and traumatized young Dom. A week after his father died, Dom assaulted Linder, which ended
Linder's racing career and sent Dom to prison for two years. Even after he was released,
Dom couldn't follow in his father's footsteps, since he received a lifetime ban from the
racetracks following the attack.
Dom and Letty Ortiz met when they were children, around the time Letty was 10 years old, and
formed a friendship around their shared love of cars. As teenagers, they began dating,
and remained together until the first Fast and the Furious film. Letty worked with Dom
stealing DVD players and other high-end electronics, and also participated in his illegal nighttime
street races. By the end of that film, Dom and Letty have to split up when the police
are made aware of Dom's criminal activities and he's forced to go on the run.
After spending some time apart, the two get back together in the Los Bandoleros short
film, which finds Letty tracking Dom down in the Dominican Republic. The couple immediately
rekindles their romance, and secretly marries before the events of the fourth movie. However,
shortly after their wedding, Dom winds up leaving Letty in order to protect her, since
the police are after him again, following his latest heist. While they're apart, he
receives some devastating news.
"Dom, it's Letty. She's been murdered."
In the first Fast and the Furious film, Dominic Toretto and L.A. police officer Brian O'Conner
are on opposite sides of the law. Dom and Brian first cross paths when Brian goes undercover
to investigate a group that's stealing electronics out of 18-wheelers. At first, Dom is wary
of Brian, but eventually he warms up to him after Brian helps him evade the police. Meanwhile,
Brian is still maintaining a carefully crafted persona, engineered to gain Dom's trust so
he can arrest him.
However, Brian genuinely likes Dom, as well as his sister Mia, and finds himself increasingly
conflicted the deeper he gets into his investigation. Eventually, Brian blows his own cover in order
to get medical help for a member of Dom's crew who's seriously injured.
"This is officer Brian O'Conner. I'm off-duty MAPD. I need a life flight rollout right away."
Betrayed, Dom tries to evade the police, but in the process, wrecks his car and resigns
himself to being arrested. Brian realizes that he can't bring himself to arrest Dom,
and instead gives him the keys to his own car, allowing Dom to escape. At first, Dom
and Brian don't keep in touch, and Brian remains a police officer, but by the end of the fourth
film, Brian fully cuts ties with the law in order to break Dom out of prison, showing
once and for all that he considers Dom family.
Dom tells Brian in The Fast and the Furious that he would rather die than return to prison,
but that isn't enough to dissuade Dom from engaging in criminal activities. After the
first Fast film, Dom graduates from stealing electronics to stealing tankers full of fuel,
and in Fast & Furious, he kills the man responsible for Letty's death by ramming him with a car.
Although Brian advocates hard for clemency for Dom after he helps him capture a notorious
drug dealer, Dom is arrested and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison without the
possibility of early parole. But before he can serve any of his sentence, Brian and Mia,
along with two of Dom's friends, chase down the prison bus transporting Dom and break
him out.
Afterward, Dom flees the country and commits various heists, culminating in the spectacularly
dramatic robbery of a drug lord who had attempted to extort him. This causes him to be pursued
by Luke Hobbs, who later enlists Dom's help in apprehending the terrorist Owen Shaw. In
exchange, Hobbs arranges for Dom's criminal record to be expunged, allowing him to return
to the United States.
Dom meets police officer Elena Neves during the events of Fast Five, during which she
works alongside Hobbs to oppose Dom and his crew. But early in the film, Dom saves Elena
from the drug lord's men, which begins to change her opinion of him. By the end of the
film, Elena and Hobbs have joined forces with Dom against their common foe, after Dom saves
them on several occasions.
Later, Hobbs decides to give Dom and his crew a 24-hour head start before he begins chasing
them, as thanks for all of Dom's help. However, rather than remain in Rio as a police officer,
Elena chooses to follow Dom to Spain, where the two of them begin a romantic relationship.
At the beginning of Fast & Furious 6, they're still together, living together on the Canary
Islands. But when Dom discovers that Letty is still alive, Elena graciously bows out
of their relationship, allowing Dom to return to Letty with a clear conscience.
In Fast & Furious 6, Dom learns that Letty is alive but suffering from amnesia. It turns
out Letty survived the accident that supposedly killed her, but lost her memory. When Owen
Shaw went to the hospital to kill her, he changed his mind and brought her into his
crew instead. Knowing Dom will do anything for Letty, Hobbs asks for his assistance apprehending
Shaw, in exchange for a full pardon.
At first, Letty has no memory of Dom and doesn't hesitate to work against him, but when Dom
risks his life to save her, it sparks a dim flicker of recognition. She eventually switches
sides to help Dom, even though she still doesn't remember him. She stays with Dom at the end
of Fast & Furious 6, and continues working with Dom and his crew throughout Furious 7.
Eventually, Letty gets her memories back during Furious 7, at which point she remembers her
wedding to Dom. Dom and Letty finally take their long-overdue honeymoon at the beginning
of Fate of the Furious, although like most things in Dom and Letty's relationship, it
doesn't exactly go according to plan.
After breaking Dom out of prison, Brian can't go back to being a police officer or FBI agent,
and instead joins Dom and Mia in their criminal activities. He functions as Dom's right-hand
man during several heists, and the two grow closer the longer they work together. Simultaneously,
Brian's relationship with Mia deepens, and she eventually becomes pregnant by the end
of Fast Five. Dom is thrilled to become an uncle to baby Jack, and comes to think of
Brian as his brother.
During the filming of Furious 7, actor Paul Walker was tragically killed in a car accident.
Initially, Vin Diesel and the rest of the Fast crew considered shutting down production
on the film, since many of them were close to Walker, especially Diesel.
Instead, they decided that the best way to honor Walker was to give Brian the happy ending
he deserved. The ending of Furious 7 was rewritten to give Brian O'Conner a peaceful exit from
the franchise, allowing him to retire from his life of crime to raise his children with
Mia.
Although Brian is alive and well in the Fast and Furious movies, he's often talked about
as someone who is deeply and profoundly missed, subtly breaking the fourth wall so the films
can acknowledge the painful loss of Walker while still allowing Brian to live on.
"You'll always be with me. And you'll always be my brother."
While no one in the Fast films has been as close to Dom as Brian or Letty, he's always
surrounded himself with close friends that he refers to as his "family." While the cast
of secondary characters Dom has surrounded himself with fluctuates for the first few
films, he now has a core group of associates he relies on for pretty much every mission
he goes on, each with their own particular skill set.
Roman Pearce was actually Brian's friend first, and was roped into his first Fast escapade
during the events of 2 Fast 2 Furious. Brian later enlisted him to help with a heist in
Fast Five, touting his ability to talk himself out of any situation, and he's been an integral
part of Dom's crew ever since.
Acting as a counterpart to Roman is Tej Parker, a skilled hacker and engineer who also made
his first appearance in the second film, but officially joined in the fifth. The most recent
addition to the crew is Ramsey, a hacker and innovator who joined the crew in Furious 7.
Luke Hobbs has also been a regular member of Dom's crew since Fast Five, but they've
since gone their separate ways, mostly so Hobbs can spin off into his own franchise.
Dom's crew also occasionally includes his friends Leo and Santos, although they don't
appear to be as close to Dom as the others.
Being a part of Dominic Toretto's "family" is not without risks, and several of Dom's
associates have lost their lives as a result of their association with him. The first to
fall was Jesse, who worked in Dom's auto shop in The Fast and the Furious and was killed
in a drive-by shooting. Next to go was Vince, Dom's childhood friend who was part of Dom's
crew in the first film, then dropped off the grid for a while before returning in the fifth
film. Vince resented Brian for his influence in Dom's life, but cared about Dom enough
to name his son after him. Vince was killed during an effort to save Luke Hobbs.
Then there are the losses that had an even larger impact on Dom and the rest of his crew.
Gisele Yashar initially worked for an opponent of Dom's in the fourth film, but wound up
switching sides when Dom showed that he valued her life more than her employer. Han Seoul-Oh
met Dom in Mexico between the first and fourth films, and worked closely with him ever since.
Han and Gisele got together in Fast Five, but she sacrificed herself to save Han in
Fast & Furious 6. Grieving, Han moved to Tokyo, where he was run off the road and supposedly
killed by Owen's brother Deckard Shaw in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The loss
of Han motivated Dom through the events of Furious 7, but as the trailers for F9 have
revealed, Han is actually still alive, somehow.
It's easy to wonder how a franchise that started out with small-scale electronics heists has
somehow graduated to nuclear terrorism. The truth is that the shift wasn't all that gradual.
In the first film, Dom and his crew are stealing DVD players and running an illegal street
racing ring. 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift both follow characters other than Dom, but
by the fourth film, although Dom's targets have gotten bigger, he's still largely pulling
the same sorts of heists. A fuel tanker is much bigger than a DVD player, but it's still
executed in much the same way as his earlier schemes.
Then, in Fast Five, the whole franchise pivots in the extreme, when Dom and his crew go from
stealing cars to planning an elaborate high-speed heist to steal an entire bank vault. In the
film, this is motivated mostly by revenge; but practically, it was an effective way of
rejuvenating the franchise by adding more ridiculous action and high-energy fun.
From there, Dom's team quickly morphs from petty thieves into an elite mercenary squad
that keeps getting hired to take down increasingly ambitious and diabolical baddies. Does it
make real-world sense? No, but in the Fast and the Furious universe, it somehow works.
At the beginning of The Fate of the Furious, Dom is ambushed on his honeymoon by a terrorist
named Cipher, who forces him to assist her in her plan to start a nuclear war, pitting
him against his own crew. It's hard to imagine anything that would cause Dom to betray his
family but Cipher finds the one thing that Dom would cherish even more than his chosen
family, his infant son.
It turns out that when Dom found out Letty was alive and Elena stepped away from their
relationship, she was actually pregnant. She wound up giving birth to a son offscreen,
and the two were subsequently kidnapped by Cipher to use as leverage over Dom.
Elena hadn't given her son a first name yet, referring to him only by his middle name,
Marcos, so Dom could choose his first name. Cipher executes Elena as punishment when Dom
allows Letty to escape, but he ultimately manages to save his son, whom he commits to
raising with Letty. At the end of The Fate of the Furious, Dom introduces his son to
his crew by his new name.
"Everyone, meet Brian."
Dom has faced a number of opponents throughout his Fast and Furious adventures, ranging from
small-scale crooks to full-on supervillains. In the first film, Johnny Tran runs a rival
street racing gang in L.A., which seems almost cute compared to the antagonists Dom has gone
up against since.
Fast & Furious brings the drug lord Arturo Braga, who arranges for the death of Letty
and works with the Shaw brothers, but is supposedly still in prison going into F9. Hernan Reyes
is the drug lord Dom's crew robbed at the end of Fast Five, killed at the end of that
film by Luke Hobbs.
The sixth film sees Dom facing off against Owen Shaw, and then in the seventh film, he
goes head to head with Owen's brother, Deckard. However, despite both Shaw brothers attempting
to execute some pretty nasty schemes, and even attempting to kill a member of Dom's
crew, they're now on more or less friendly terms with Dom after they both helped rescue
his son from Cipher in The Fate of the Furious. Cipher, on the other hand, remains not only
free, but still intent on causing a nuclear war, and, if the trailers for F9 are any indication,
determined to kill Dom in the process.
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