Sean's Entire Fast & Furious Backstory Explained
In 2005, the nascent "Fast & Furious" franchise already seemed to be running out of gas. Universal Pictures was apparently unsatisfied with the first sequel, "2 Fast 2 Furious," which grossed only a little more than the original film on nearly twice the budget, and Vin Diesel — one of the two leading men of the first "Fast and the Furious" — had departed the franchise with no plans to return. Universal executives now planned to use "The Fast and the Furious" as a label for cheaper, direct-to-video films, but screenwriter Chris Morgan pitched them a story idea that made them reconsider — transplanting the characters to Tokyo, where they would participate in the fresh, exciting drift racing scene.
The studio mandated that this new movie, "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," feature all new characters and be set, at least in part, at a high school. Thus, a new protagonist, juvenile delinquent Sean Boswell, was born. Portrayed by Lucas Black, Sean only carried the torch of the "Fast Saga" for the one film, which was critically panned and ultimately underwhelmed at the box office. He has since returned for small roles in "Furious 7" and "F9," but while Sean may not have left an enormous stamp on the franchise, his own story in "Tokyo Drift" is pretty packed. Below, a breakdown of how Sean essentially lives through a coming-of-age movie, a gangster movie, and a sports movie all at once, then lives to see another day.
Sean Boswell has been run out of every place he's ever lived
Growing up, Sean Boswell never stays in one place for very long. His parents divorce when he's three years old, and his father (Brian Goodman) — a US Navy officer — eventually leaves the country for a position in Tokyo, Japan. Back in the States, Sean and his mother (Lynda Boyd) move frequently, often due to young Sean's reckless or criminal behavior. Their roots are in Alabama, but by the time the audience first meets Sean at the start of "Tokyo Drift," he's attending a high school in Arizona, his third town in only two years.
At 17, Sean is a loner, interested in only one thing — driving. It isn't clear where this love affair with cars begins — his father is also a gearhead, but he left long before he could've taught Sean much — but it is known that he takes to driving and street racing very quickly. Sean gets a speeding ticket on his first day as a licensed driver and handily wins his first race the day after that.
Sean finds a sense of calm and control in the act of driving, but it only makes his life more chaotic. His new passion results in two arrests on his record before "Tokyo Drift" even starts, but since he and his mother leave town after each of his screw-ups, Sean continually escapes long-term consequences for his actions and develops a total apathy to the destruction in his wake.
He wrecks a house in a spectacular street race
One afternoon after school, Sean finds himself conversing with his classmate, Cindy (Nikki Griffin), in the parking lot. Cindy's boyfriend, football star Clay (Zachery Ty Bryan), doesn't care for this and, after some teasing from Sean, throws a baseball through the window of Sean's prized and customized 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Cindy, who clearly gets a kick out of playing with her boyfriend's insecurities, suggests that Clay and Sean settle their dispute in a street race, putting herself up as the prize.
The two drivers — Sean in his Monte Carlo, Clay in a much newer and more expensive Dodge Viper with Cindy riding shotgun — race through a construction site for an upscale suburban housing development before an audience of excited high schoolers. Falling behind in the race, Sean attempts to overcome interference by Clay's football teammates and his own difficulty cornering by taking a shortcut through one of the half-built houses. This puts him neck and neck with Clay and Cindy and helps him get to the finish line first, but Clay's aggressive driving ends up sending both cars out of control, and all three participants are injured.
A car crash, a busted-up face, and his third arrest in two years all fail to wipe the smug grin from Sean's face. Only learning that the police have crushed his Monte Carlo gets a rise out of him.
Sean is shipped off to Tokyo to avoid jail time
After the construction site debacle, the police threaten Sean with some serious charges that seem like they may finally put the brakes on his street racing career. However, Sean's mother manages to arrange one last reprieve by sending him off to Tokyo to live with his father.
Perhaps worth noting is that the credits list Sean's dad as "Major Boswell," even though there's no such thing as a major in the US Navy. It also seems doubtful that someone could be allowed this kind of improvised overseas probation, but this being a "Fast & Furious" movie, suspension of disbelief comes with the territory.
Major Boswell sets a few strict but simple rules for Sean to live by — go to school, come right home, and no driving. Sean resents his father as much as he resents rules in general, so he gets involved in the Tokyo street racing scene on his first full day in town. When Major Boswell learns that Sean has disobeyed him, he initially threatens to have him sent back to the US, where juvenile hall is waiting. Instead, the major decides to give Sean one last chance, and while the young racer then expands his nightlife significantly, the subject of Sean breaking their arrangement is never brought up again. Sean soon acquires new worries even more immediate than juvenile hall.
Sean's first drift race is a disaster
Admittedly, Sean doesn't have to work very hard to find where the action is. The first person to try and befriend him at school is Twinkie (Shad "Bow Wow" Moss), an American Army brat who knows about a major race happening that very night. Twinkie takes Sean to a multi-level parking structure where young drivers race to the top, executing precise drifts to turn tight corners. There, he encounters another of his classmates, Neela (Nathalie Kelley), who he takes an immediate liking to. But once again, he butts heads with a jealous boyfriend. Neela is involved with Takashi (Brian Tee), who earned his nickname "D.K." (short for "Drift King") for being the best racer on the circuit.
Echoing the last time he competed with another driver for a woman's attention, the foolish and headstrong Sean challenges Takashi to a race. Eager for the chance to embarrass the boy, Takashi accepts. But there are two problems. Sean has neither a car to race with nor the first idea of how drifting works. Takashi's friend, the incredible Han (Sung Kang), solves the first problem, offering up his own highly modified Nissan Silvia S15 on a lark. The second, however, proves insurmountable, as Twinkie's cursory explanation of drifting is insufficient to keep Sean from humiliating himself and doing thousands of dollars' worth of damage to Han's Nissan.
Han, impossibly cool, has just three parting words for Sean: "Don't leave town."
Han takes Sean under his wing
Sean is now heavily in debt to Han, the suave, snack-loving gangster known as Han Seoul-Oh in later "Fast & Furious" films. Han runs a garage and has vaguely defined connections to organized crime, though Sean (along with the audience) is insulated from the details of his business. Sean only needs to concern himself with pickups and deliveries and answering the phone whenever Han calls. These are rules Sean has no trouble following, and he begins to share in Han's glamorous lifestyle, going so far as to move out of his father's apartment and into a bunk at Han's garage. Han is genuinely fond of Sean and has no hard feelings over the wrecked Nissan. In fact, Han sees the loss of one car as a bargain in exchange for getting to know someone's character. The two develop a close mentor/mentee relationship as Han teaches Sean that there's more to life than just racing.
Not that racing isn't still important. Granted, Sean has never had difficulty driving before, as more linear American street racing came very naturally to him. But Han agrees to teach Sean how to drift so that he can have a chance at a rematch against D.K. Takashi. Having to essentially start from scratch and really work at something seems to teach Sean some much-needed discipline. And the training pays off, as Sean wins his return race against D.K.'s lieutenant, Morimoto (Leonardo Nam).
Unable to run away, Sean finally makes some friends
It's easy to get the impression that it's been years since Sean was in any one place long enough to make friends and that he's long since given up on the idea of getting attached to people. Upon arriving in Tokyo, Sean is disinterested in talking to anyone since he assumes that he'll be sent back to the US before too long.
But as his stay in Tokyo lasts longer than he imagined, Sean begins to make real connections to some of his peers, like Twinkie. Back in Arizona, Sean once turned a blind eye to another kid being bullied, but here, he makes a point of standing up for Twinkie when he's attacked at school by Morimoto. True, Twinkie berates Sean for his interference, but only a few months ago, it's unlikely that Sean would've even cared that someone was in trouble. Sean also spends time sharing in Twinkie's interests, accompanying him on one of his sales excursions on the streets of Tokyo.
Later, when Sean's feud with D.K. becomes a life-and-death struggle, Twinkie volunteers most of his earnings to help Sean settle a debt and resolve things peacefully. If not for this act of friendship, it's unlikely that Sean would've survived to the end of "Tokyo Drift."
He learns to take things slow with Neela
Sean also steadily matures in his interactions with Neela, his classmate who has a complicated relationship with D.K. Takashi. Sean's early flirtations with Neela are presumptuous and are justly rebuffed, but soon, he begins to make the effort to actually get to know her on her own terms. They become real friends, all without Sean ever misrepresenting his romantic interest.
Sean and Neela bond over their shared love of cars and drift racing but also their mutual status as outsiders in Japanese society. Despite being born in Japan, Neela carries the stigma of being the child of an Australian immigrant who Takashi implies was a sex worker. After her mother's death, Neela is taken in by the Yakuza-affiliated Kamata family and raised alongside Takashi, but she's never treated as if she truly belongs. Even Takashi treats Neela more like a possession or, at best, someone who's deeply indebted to his family. Neela's story helps Sean to realize that he's willfully separated himself from other people, a habit that he leaves behind over the course of the film.
Sean and Neela's relationship doesn't go unnoticed by Takashi, who delivers Sean a beating and a final warning to stay away from his girlfriend. This is the last straw for Neela, who finds the courage to leave Takashi and takes shelter at Han's garage.
Sean gets caught in the middle of a gang war
By his own admission, one of the reasons Han likes keeping Sean around is to annoy his business partner, Takashi. While Takashi is the better connected of the two, the nephew of Yakuza boss Kamata (Sonny Chiba), Han is older and more shrewd. As it turns out, Han may even be using Sean to divert Takashi's attention from a far more serious betrayal — Han has been hiding some of his deals from Takashi, effectively stealing from the commission owed to Kamata and humiliating Takashi in the eyes of his uncle.
Takashi comes to Han's garage seeking revenge and is further enraged to see that Neela and Sean are both living there. The three of them flee the scene, Han in one car, Sean and Neela in another, and they're pursued individually by Takashi and his friend, Morimoto, through the streets of Shibuya. A deadly chase ensues, and when Takashi is neck and neck with Sean and Neela and attempts to nudge them off the road, Han drops back and puts his own car between them. This helps get Sean and Neela out of danger, but it puts him in the path of oncoming traffic as he is T-boned by another, uninvolved vehicle and is apparently killed in the ensuing explosion.
Worth noting is how "Fast & Furious 6 "retcons this crash from accident to attempted murder by identifying the driver as Deckard Shaw, retaliating for Han's role in defeating his brother, Owen.
He bets his future on a dangerous downhill drift race
After Han's death, Sean no longer has any protection from Takashi, who still wants him dead. Sean's father offers to send him back to the United States to escape Takashi's vengeance, but Sean refuses. He feels responsible for the mess he's in, and his days of running away from his problems are over. Instead, he throws himself at the mercy of Takashi's uncle, Kamata, apologizing in person for Han's deception and offering a non-violent resolution to his conflict with Takashi — a "loser leaves town" race. The absurd suggestion seems to amuse Kamata, and the challenge is accepted.
With his own car damaged in the Shibuya chase and the rest of Han's drivable cars seized by the police, Sean once again finds himself without a ride for his race against the Drift King. All that's left in Han's garage is the wreck of the Nissan that Sean used in his ill-fated drift racing debut. Sean, Twinkie, and the rest of Han's pit crew join forces with Sean's father to combine the high-performance parts from Han's Nissan with the chassis of a vintage Mustang that the major has been working on, creating a new ride that's both American and Japanese.
In a perilous high-speed, drift-heavy contest down a precarious winding mountainside road, Sean crosses the finish line first, winning his and Neela's freedom and the title of Drift King.
Dom Toretto promises Sean justice for Han
At the end of "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," Sean is paid a visit by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), who challenges him to a race in honor of their mutual close friend, Han. However, "Furious 7" (which takes place immediately after "Tokyo Drift" but was shot about a decade later) expands this encounter to reveal that this isn't just a friendly visit. As it turns out, Dom is on the trail of Han's killer, Deckard Shaw.
Now that the "Fast & Furious" timeline has caught up with "Tokyo Drift," Black is back in the series. He was originally slated to appear in "The Fate of the Furious," but instead returned in 2021's "F9," where he, Twinkie, and fellow Han garage alumnus Earl (Jason Tobin) met up with the Toretto gang.
While Sean Boswell is certainly no Dominic Toretto, and the shifting timeline of the series means that Black is now over a decade older than his character, recent positive critical reevaluations of "Tokyo Drift" have cleared the way for the character's return. After all, if neither murdering a beloved crew member nor even death itself has proven enough to exclude someone from the "Furious" family, why should being the lead in "Tokyo Drift"?
Sean, Twinkie and Earl relocate to Germany
Following the events of "Furious 7," which caught Toretto's team up to the retconned timeline that saw "Tokyo Drift" occurring during or after the events of "Fast & Furious 6," the guys in Japan weren't heard from again until "F9" found them on another continent altogether. Sean and his buddies Twinkie and Earl (Jason Tobin) have moved to Germany, where they now build specialty cars for the government at the Jähn Jet Propulsion Test Site in Cologne.
Toretto's team is doing their own secret government work these days, for a character named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), the leader of a very hush-hush covert ops organization. Their latest mission has to do with stopping Cipher (Charlize Theron) from overtaking the world with a universal hacking device called Project Aries, and Dom sends his lieutenants Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) to recruit the German outpost to their cause.
There is, of course, no mention of the romance Sean had back in "Tokyo Drift," but there have legitimately been a couple years between then and now, even on this convoluted timeline, so a breakup is reasonable. Plus it's safe to assume that if he moved full-time to Germany, he wasn't still with Neela.
A rocket-powered Pontiac Fiero
Watching Sean's crew at work is kind of like asking the question, what if "Jackass" existed in the "Cars" universe? When Roman and Tej arrive in Germany, Sean, Twinkie and Earl are strapping high-powered rocket engines to the roofs of itty bitty Pontiac Fieros, sporty two-seaters built between 1984 and 1988 that looked like Matchbox cars.
The purpose of this firecracker experiment is apparently to race jet planes. The guys are generally thrilled if their sacrificial Fiero neither blows up nor melts at the end, so that says all there is to say about how successful they are. Still, Roman and Tej are there specifically for some wheels at Dom's request, and they intend to procure some, even though it's quite obvious from the priceless looks on both of their faces that neither of them wants to deal with these maniacs.
For what it's worth, it's obvious the guys love what they're doing. They're living out every eight-year-old boy's childhood fantasy. But the actors bring a true balance of scientific examination to their giddiness and it feels authentic that this is a niche field they're well qualified for and also excited to do every day.
Launching Tej and Roman into space
For reasons too convoluted to list, Tej and Roman must get into close physical contact with an orbiting satellite in order for Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) to prevent the universal hacking program Project Aries from taking over the world once uploaded. Luckily, they just so happen to know a few guys working with a European space program.
Soon, Sean and Earl are piloting a giant plane into the stratosphere with a rocket-powered Pontiac Fiero strapped on top, where it will then have to make contact with a satellite 50 miles above the earth's surface while in that perpetual freefall known as orbit. Sure, Earl's still running launch simulations on his iPad, but they're at least mostly certain that the DIY astronauts will be safe.
A couple of boosters and more than a little icing later and the Fiero has broken through the atmosphere, with Tej and Roman along for the ride. Now that Tej's math and science has brought them this far, Roman's in charge of the thrusters because driving a car in space is just like driving a car on a road. Still, the sequence is pretty spectacular all around, with the fun, humor, and high stakes, edge-of-your-seat action for which the franchise is known.
Reunited with Han and part of the family
After all is said and done, Dom throws a family cookout back at his place in Los Angeles — or at least, where it's being rebuilt — and now the family includes Earl, Twinkie, and Sean. Family has always been a theme for the franchise, and a driving force for Dom in particular. The men and women of the crew are his brethren, so it's fitting that when Han comes around the corner and sees Sean grabbing beers with the rest of the Tokyo gang, the two embrace like long lost brothers. Because for these characters in this environment, they are.
Han introduces the guys to Elle (Anna Sawai), who has been his ward since her parents were killed, and Sean hugs her too, still quintessentially a Southern boy no matter how much time he spends overseas. Everyone mingles about and the camera jumps from group to group to check in on how everyone is doing, and that's pretty much it for Sean Boswell in the "Fast and the Furious" films series thus far, but there's one more really nice touch before the credits roll.
Before they can all dig in and eat, Dom points out there's still an empty seat; Mia (Jordana Brewster) says he's on his way (referring to her husband Brian, played by Paul Walker, who died in 2013) just as the familiar purring of his car can be heard. Now, the family's all here.