Joseph Gordon-Levitt would have been the star of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift had director Justin Lin gotten his way. After deals for Vin Diesel or Paul Walker to lead the third film in the Fast & Furious franchise didn't come together, the series pivoted to focus on Sean Boswell, an American teenager in Japan who learns how to drift.

Lucas Black was cast in the lead role, but he was not the original choice, it turns out. As revealed by Barry Hertz's new book "Welcome To The Family" , Lin had his eyes on Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play Sean in Tokyo Drift . This was part of a plan to make Sean half-Japanese (Gordon-Levitt has never claimed to have Asian ancestry, for the record).

The director and the young actor met about the possibility, meeting in the editing room o

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