After welcoming a daughter last week, actor Vin Diesel announced Monday that he had named his baby girl after his late friend and “Fast and Furious” series co-star Paul Walker.
Diesel, 47, revealed the child’s name in an interview with Natalie Morales on “Today.”
“I named her Pauline,” he said.
Diesel said he chose the name as a tribute to Walker.
“It felt like, you know, a way to keep his memory a part of my family and a part of my world,” he said.
Walker, 40, was killed in a car crash in Valencia in November 2013, but Diesel told Morales he felt his presence when Pauline was born.
“He was in the room,” Diesel said. “There’s no other person that I was thinking about as I was cutting this umbilical cord. I just … knew he was there.”
Diesel announced the birth last week on Facebook with a photo accompanied by lyrics from the song “What a Wonderful World.”
The baby is Diesel’s third child with longtime girlfriend Paloma Jimenez.
Last week, the actor attended an advanced screening of “Furious 7” in Los Angeles and paid tribute to his former co-star, who died before filming of the final installment of the popular movie franchise was finished.
“It was in some ways the hardest movie I ever had to do,” Diesel said. “Because the relationships that you see on film are so real. When the tragedy happened, I lost my best friend. I lost my brother.”
The film is set to be released in theaters on April 3.
CNN and KTLA sister station WGN contributed to this story.
