‘Fast & Furious 6’ Co-Star Luke Evans on the Future of Owen Shaw and Helen Mirren’s Role
In the upcoming live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, Luke Evans will be playing one of the great Disney bad guys, the arrogant gasbag Gaston. But the actor’s also known for another villainous turn: as the criminal mastermind Owen Shaw in the Fast and Furious movies. The younger brother of Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw, Owen was last seen in a coma in Furious 7 after falling from an airplane at the end of 2013’s Fast & Furious 6. Could Owen get a resurrection in a future movie? (He certainly wouldn’t be the first.)
Evans couldn’t say in a recent chat with Yahoo Movies’ Gwynne Watkins, but he did reveal that the Shaw brothers have a formidable mother on their side: The Fate of the Furious cast member Helen Mirren. “People come around from comas, so who knows?” said Evans, who’s not set to appear in the eighth film in the franchise. “He’s in a military hospital because he’s the most wanted man in the world, but he’s got a very powerful brother, and he’s now got a mum as well, who’s played by Helen Mirren.”
Mirren was one of the new sequel’s casting coups last year. But her role had a long backstory: All the way back in 2015, she’d told Yahoo Movies that she was a huge fan of Vin Diesel and the series. “I so want to be a mad driver in a Fast and Furious movie. My claim to fame is I always do my own driving,” she’d said. When Diesel heard the news later that year, he offered some prescient speculation on who Mirren could play. “There are so many options!” he told Entertainment Tonight. “You’ve got Nathalie Emmanuel’s mother. You’ve got, of course, the matriarch to the Shaw brothers!” (Emmanuel plays Ramsey, a computer hacker, who joined the crew in Furious 7.)
Related: Watch ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Star Luke Evans Describe What It Takes to Play Gaston
Rubber finally met road when Mirren was cast in the eighth movie, The Fate of the Furious. And although we got an intriguing still of Diesel and Mirren (see above) while filming was going on, we never got details on who she’s playing, and she’s yet to appear in the movie’s trailers, which show the team chasing down a rogue Dom (Diesel), seemingly with help from old foe Deckard (Statham). (Mirren did drop a hint to Variety in October, saying “I had always had a secret hankering to do Fast and Furious because I love driving cars. Of course, when I finally got my chance, I wasn’t driving the bloody car. I was in the back of an ambulance with Jason Statham.”)
The studio behind the movie, Universal, declined to comment on Evans’s reveal, but if he’s right, will Fast and Furious please give us a Shaw family reunion one day? And will someone let Helen Mirren drive a bloody car already?
The Fate of the Furious is hitting theaters on April 14, while Beauty and the Beast premieres a month earlier on March 17.
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