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It's All About Family: Fast & Furious' Toretto Family Tree Explained
Dominic Toretto throws around the word "family" a lot in the Fast & Furious franchise. However, these are his actual family members.
Ask anyone with even a cursory understanding of the Fast & Furious franchise and they’ll tell you that it’s a story all about family. In the case of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), that term can be both literal and very, very loosely applied to the most important people in his life.
Since uniting the team from all the past movies in Fast Five, Dom has considered people like Tej (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Han (Sung Kang), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), who he regularly pulls off heists with, as family. However, he also has a handful of actual blood relatives that helped shape him into the wholesome, streetwise crime don that we know and love in Fast X.
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As is mentioned in F9, the Toretto bloodline is a pretty mixed bag and difficult for even the most diehard of Fast fans to keep track of. So we thought we’d set aside the more metaphorical members of the family and give a breakdown on just the people that Dominic is actually related to by either blood or marriage.
Abuelita Toretto (Rita Moreno)
In what was surely a get for the cast of Fast X, Oscar winner Rita Moreno joined as Dominic’s grandmother. It is revealed at the opening BBQ that she is the mother of his father, Jack. We don’t learn too much more about her other than she is a hell of a cook, is very proud of Dom, and she’s clearly where he gets his propensity to give big, inspiring speeches about family.
Jack Toretto (JD Pardo)
Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way — we have absolutely no idea who Dominic’s mother is. She hasn’t really come up much in the franchise. Who looms much larger over the whole Toretto family, though, is Jack, Dominic’s damn near saintly father.
Jack was a father of three who got into stock car racing and allowed his two boys to be on his pit crew. This is where Dominic learned everything he knows about both cars and respect. Sadly, tragedy struck in 1989 when the Toretto family fell on hard times. Desperate to do anything he could to shield Dom from this fact, Jack asked his other son, Jakob (John Cena), to tamper with his car so that he could throw the race. However, when another racer on the track clipped Jack’s car, it hit the wall at 120 mph, killing him instantly. Just like that, Dominic became the patriarch figure of the Toretto family.
Jakob Toretto (John Cena)
After the race that killed their father, Dominic went to prison for assaulting the driver who he thought killed his dad. While in prison, he figured out that Jakob tampered with the car but didn’t know why. Jakob refused to break the promise he made to their father to never let Dominic know he was throwing the race. The second he got out of prison, Dom raced his little brother with the stakes being the loser never returns to Los Angeles. Jakob lost and Dom didn’t see him again until the events of F9 when it's revealed that somewhere in his years of exile, Jakob began working for Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) as a spy.
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However, Jakob decided to go rogue and betray Mr. Nobody, likely due to his love for his older brother. For the first time, Jakob and Dom go head-to-head. Although they’re pretty evenly matched, Dom had his family while Jakob’s people betrayed him once he’d outlived his usefulness. In that time, he finally revealed the truth about their dad’s death to his older brother and the two were able to mend fences.
Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster)
Throughout all of Dominic’s exploits, his little sister never left his side — even in the early movies when he and his friends were being huge pains in her butt (looking at you, Vince). After Jakob left, she stuck around at their family home and helped run Dominic’s sandwich shop while he and his friends were out stealing DVD players and winning street races.
After everyone was forced to go on the run following the events of The Fast and the Furious, Mia managed to stay in the United States, likely as bait by the FBI to catch Dominic. When her childhood friend Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) gets caught up with and seemingly killed by the Braga Cartel, Mia finally does come back, along with her former love interest, Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker). After the boys put their differences aside and take down Braga, Mia allows herself to rekindle her romance with Brian. Together, they bust Dominic out of police custody and go on the run as a family.
She would remain a member of the heisting family through the events in Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, and Furious 7. After that, she and Brian took a step back from the dangerous life they lead to raise their son, Jack (Dominic’s nephew). She only came back into the picture when Jakob returned to their lives in F9.
Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez)
Dominic and Letty have been romantically linked since they were kids. After Brian’s betrayal in the first movie, she began doing missions in the Dominican Republic with Dom and his new crew, Los Bandoleros. When the heat got too heavy, Dom and Letty took a break. During that time, she began working with Brian and the FBI to try and get Dom out of hiding. However, during a mission with the Braga Cartel, she was injured and presumably killed. It is later revealed that Gisele (Gal Gadot) rescued her, but that her memory was lost due to her injuries.
Knowing only that she had a very unique set of skills behind the wheel, she joined up with Owen Shaw’s crew and helped him on a series of international missions that eventually put them smack dab in Dominic’s crosshairs. Eventually, she switches sides and returns to Dom, despite not having her memory back. They live together and he works hard to get her to remember who she was. Eventually, she gets her memory back, including the memory of marrying Dom in the Dominican Republic, officially making her Dom’s wife.
Brian Marcos AKA “Little B” (Leo Abelo Perry)
So this is where things get tricky. In Fast Five, although Dom was married to Letty, he thought she was dead (we all did). So, he began a relationship with a Brazilian police officer named Elena (Elsa Pataky). She helped take down the Reyes crime organization because he was responsible for much of her family’s suffering. After the dust settled post-Rio, Dom and Elena spent some time in hiding together where it turns out they conceived a child.
Dominic was unaware of that fact since he left Elena to go rescue Letty. That is until Cipher (Charlize Theron) kidnaps Elena and her baby.
Unfortunately, part of Cipher’s evil plan involved executing Elena right in front of Dom. By the time he had gotten clear of Cipher’s master plan, he and Letty had adopted Little B to raise as a married couple. So, while Little B is Dom’s biological son, Letty is his stepmom. They spent time together at a secret hideout outside of London until the events of F9, when they’re given the green light to go back home to Los Angeles.
Catch up on this complicated family history and more with the franchise, now streaming on Peacock.
Fast X is now in theaters. You can buy tickets here!
