John Wick wastes little time on anything as tedious as a backstory. Wick is a loner who’s lost his wife to an unspecified illness — there are flashbacks — and inherits a puppy to help him cope with her death, spending his days moping about in a 1969 Mustang Mach1 Coupé, having retired from his previous job, which happened to be the world’s greatest hitman. When he refuses to sell his car to some strangers he meets in a petrol station, who turn out to be Russian gangsters, they later break into his house, beat him up, take his car and kill the puppy. Wick comes out of retirement.
“High-jinks ensue,” Reeves smiles. “I think a lot of people’s responses to the first film were: ‘You know, once you kill a dog you can just do whatever you want’. Right?'”
As fellow hitman Marcus [Willem Dafoe] puts it: “There’s no rhyme nor reason to this life.” John Wick also borrowed two tropes familiar to any student of the director John Woo: “gun-fu” and “car-fu”.
“It really means just having some kind of multi-purpose with something,” Reeves explains. “So, something like hitting people with a car, that’s ‘car-fu’. If you’re doing ‘gun-fu’ it’s, like: ‘OK, I’ve got a pistol but now I’m also doing judo moves or going into jujitsu moves’. So it’s integrating one skill into something else at a high level of dexterity. He he!”
Anyway, for the first time in a decade, Keanu Reeves had a hit on his hands. (Even the critics liked it.) John Wick: Chapter 2 comes out this month. At 52, he is back in the position of being able to open a blockbuster.
“Recently I’m maybe a little closer to being able to break into that world again,” is how he puts it. “I don’t know.”
Talking to Reeves isn’t straightforward. On one hand he is unfailingly polite, courteous, engaged and charming. Shy even. But his answers tend towards vagaries that peter out in a single sentence, or else he’ll deflect questions with a quip or a funny voice. He is a master of speaking without saying much of anything at all. For example, when I throw out a feeble question about what appealed to him about John Wick, he has this to say: “I really liked the character. I liked John’s grief, I liked his will, I liked his fighting for his self-agency,” which at the time you nod along with in agreement, and only afterwards think: well, what does that mean? It’s certainly a depth of character not immediately apparent while Wick is in the middle of a six-minute nightclub shootout.
Reeves has always had cult appeal. In the Nineties, clever-clever Brit cultural magazine The Modern Review put him on its cover, alongside a profile of Roland Barthes. A school in Pasadena ran a course on the films of Keanu Reeves, where students read Hegel and Foucault the better to gain insight into his stoic detachment. Last year, the hipster London bookshop Idea produced a range of popular “KEANU” totes and sweatshirts.
There remains no one else quite like him. He was a teenage hero in the Eighties (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Parenthood), an action star in the Nineties (Point Break, Speed), surfed the indie movie boom (My Own Private Idaho, Feeling Minnesota) and was a pioneer of the Noughties noir comic book explosion (The Matrix series, Constantine).
When you consider the biggest star of Point Break wasn’t Reeves but Patrick Swayze, you start to appreciate that entire generations of A-listers have come and gone in his wake. Rob Lowe had a good run of it as did Charlie Sheen, as did Robert Downey Jr before being rescued by Iron Man, but none has endured the same way as Reeves.
But you’re a movie star, the friend suggested. “So’s Mickey Mouse,” he replied.
Today, Reeves bats away the suggestion these unknowable qualities have helped him endure. “Yeah, I am private. I mean, everybody’s mostly private,” he says.
You must be the only major Hollywood star who doesn’t even have an official website. “I think actors and actresses are maybe a little more private than other celebrities,” he offers. “I don’t know. Let’s look at the analytics, shall we?” — he mimes cutting to an infographic, as if on a TV news show — “‘OK! So, in the modern day…’ I don’t know. I’m a pretty private person. But I don’t have anything to tweet, or say, or anything.”
There is, I persist, a neat parallel between the lone wolves in black suits he plays on screen, and the lone wolf in a black suit he appears to be off screen. “I think I’ll neither confirm nor deny the observation,” he says. “A couple! I’ve played a couple.”
Come on. “Constantine.”
Neo. “Yes, [Neo’s alias] Thomas Anderson…”
John Wick. “John Wick. OK, there’s a couple.”
We could keep going. “Siddhārtha,” Reeves teases. He means Prince Siddhārtha Gautama, or Buddha, from 1993’s Little Buddha. Perhaps the coolest loner of them all.
His parents met in Beirut, which, before the country was destroyed by civil war in the Seventies, was a major commercial, financial and cultural centre. It was also the crossroads for the narcotics trade of the Middle East. His Essex-born mother, Patricia, met his Chinese-Hawaiian father, Samuel, there. Some reports suggest Patricia worked as a showgirl, others that her parents met at university. Samuel’s job has never been disclosed.
“I don’t have any memories of it,” Reeves tells me. “I think I was only six or seven months old when my parents left.”
For the next few years, the family moved around: America, Australia. Reeves’ sister, Kim, was born in the latter. By the time he was seven, the children were living in Toronto with their mother. Samuel was now out of the picture and Patricia had married Paul Aaron, an American Broadway and film director. She worked as a costume designer, to David Bowie for one. Reeves recalls meeting Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. Alice Cooper babysat. In 1994, Reeves’ father was arrested in Hawaii trying to sell large quantities of heroin and cocaine, and later sentenced to 10 years in jail (released in ’96). Reeves has previously said they have not spoken since he was 13. Patricia divorced Aaron within a year, and went on to marry (and divorce) rock promoter Robert Miller and hair salon owner Jack Bond. As children, Reeves and Kim were frequently left to fend for themselves.
“We were latchkey kids,” he says. “It was basically ‘leave the house in the morning and come back at night’. It was cool.”
You must have been the envy of friends.
“No, no, we were all doing that,” Reeves says. “It doesn’t have to be dangerous. We were in the park, playing street hockey, basketball… it wasn’t like we were sitting in court. We did do a little bit of stealing candy. But, you know, if we’re talking 11, 12, we were just running around. You’d build go-karts, go to the movies… you know?”
In what ways are you like your parents?
“Hmmm,” he says. “I don’t know my father that well but I think that we probably have the same kind of certain sense of humour, share a little sense of the humour, the way we look at the world. And then from my mum… she’s English. There’s a formality to her. So, I think partly some of my kind of formality. I would say that. Yeah.”
Reeves started acting professionally at 15. He was a self-motivated kid. “I got an experience of it from school. Doing scenes. And Shakespeare. It was fun.”
Did you know you were good? “I think my Mercutio was pretty good.”
It’s still talked about today, I tease. “Yes! Yes! ‘Let’s go to the ‘memory screen’…'”
He was going to night school doing Uta Hagen’s famous Respect for Acting class, at the same time taking improv classes at Second City, the sketch and comedy troupe in Toronto. By 16, he was driving eight hours to New York to sit in on acting classes at HB Studio, alma mater of Robert De Niro and Jack Lemmon. An amateur psychologist might suggest all this self-motivation was spurred by a disruptive home life, his dad, a desire to make something of himself.
“Yeah, I would imagine,” Reeves agrees. “I guess it’s that nature/nurture kind of concept. Definitely I wouldn’t say it didn’t have an impact. Who can say whether or not those influences happen [to make a difference]? But I think it has to be in your temperament as well. I have a pretty self-motivated temperament. Even when I was a kid. ‘Let’s go make something!’ ‘Let’s do something!’ ‘Yeah!'”
“But I loved to go to the movies as a kid and I loved watching movies. I don’t know if it was escapism. Even the act of going outside to the movies for me, and watching them in a room. I wanted to be there, you know?” he says. “I wanted to do that. And that happened in Hollywood! So, I wanted to act in movies. In Hollywood. It was my dream! Whatever that meant. You know?”
In 1989, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure made Reeves a star (“it should open to tame reviews and peter out from there”, predicted The Hollywood Reporter). In short succession came its sequel then Point Break and My Own Private Idaho. Reeves became a pin-up.
“Was I? Crazy! No!” he says. “I never thought of myself as that.”
That wasn’t something you felt comfortable with? “I didn’t experience it like that.”
You must have at least been aware of it. Teen magazines went nuts for you. (In Britain, Sky magazine devoted 15 pages to him in various stages of undress. Just Seventeen gave away a neon green Keanu keyring.) “I don’t know. I didn’t run into it a lot.”
No screaming girls? “No, never had that.”
How come? “I don’t know. But that just didn’t happen. I didn’t have that experience.”
As Reeves tells it, the first taste of global stardom came when he and a friend visited the cinema one evening, somewhere near the University of Los Angeles. “We went to get an ice cream and the guy’s, like, ‘River’s Edge!’ And he wouldn’t let me pay. And I was, like, ‘Come on’. And he was, like, ‘No! River’s Edge!’ I was, like, ‘Cool’.”
Free ice cream. It’s not the greatest blag ever. “But it was cool that it came with River’s Edge! Because of River’s Edge! The guy’s, like, ‘River’s Edge!’ And I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah! Thanks, man!'”
Other young men in his position would have filled their shagging boots. “No! I didn’t have… I played in a band [mid-Nineties grunge act Dogstar] for a few years. But I was dumb…”
A script for the third Bill & Ted film has been around since 2009. “There have been different versions now for seven years. In the meantime, we just get older,” says Reeves. “Luckily that fits the story.”
Here, as Reeves tells it, is the story. “The premise is basically that Bill and Ted were told they were going to write a song that would save the world, and they haven’t. And so they’re collapsing under the pressure. So now their marriages are falling apart, they’re unemployed and they’ve gone crazy with all the instruments. They’re still Wyld Stallyns but now there are didgeridoos and zithers and all sorts of stuff and they’ve kind of lost their minds. So The Future comes to them and says there’s going to be a cosmic event at this certain time and if they don’t invent the song then all of the cosmos is going to collapse on itself. So now it’s not just the world [in danger, as in Excellent Adventure], it’s the cosmos and [the movie] starts playing with time and space. It’s just all breaking down. And they just can’t write the song.”
Why has it taken all this time? “The rights and the money to make it.”
The Hollywood process? “The Process!” announces Reeves, as though I’ve stumbled across the pulleys and the pistons that make Hollywood work. “Yes! Yes! It’s The Process.”
In the early nineties, the director of Die Hard was trying to get a new movie off the ground, Speed. Reeves wasn’t interested. After years of playing high-school outcasts he’d proved he could do action with Point Break, playing Johnny Utah, an undercover cop who learns to surf to infiltrate a gang of bank robbers disguised as US ex-presidents. (“An exercise in stylish lunkheadedness”, The Washington Post.) But a bomb on a bus, Reeves, figured: who cares? “I remember the script and I was like, ‘Eh?'” he recalls. “I mean, the plot’s ridiculous.”
His agent lobbied hard for it. Reeves says he eventually relented when he found a way in, via his character Jack Tavern, an everyman who tries to be a hero. In a genre dominated by bare-chested cartoony types — Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis — Reeves’ character, all close-cropped hair and deferential charm to co-star Sandra Bullock, represented something new and zeitgeisty. (“Speed is bare of emotional development. It’s characters are no more than sketches. It addresses no social concerns. It is morally inert. It’s the movie of the summer”, The New Yorker.) Reeves did, however, draw the line at Speed 2. Even after director Jan de Bont and Bullock doorstepped him. “They said, ‘You’ve got to do this’,” he remembers. “And I said, ‘I read the script and I can’t. It’s called Speed and it’s on a cruise ship’.”
The studio were furious. “I didn’t work at Fox for 15 years,” Reeves says.
That’s some grudge. “Yeah.” Is that how it works? “Yup! It’s a jungle out there.”
In fact, Reeves turned his back on a rumoured $5.5m for a completely different gig. Playing Hamlet at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, a 789-seater in Winnipeg, Canada for the standard Equity fee of less than $2,000 a week. He learned his lines while making Speed. “When I was shooting Speed,” he recalls, chuckling at his own drugs joke. “Ha ha! Just fucking mainlining fucking speed!”
Why did he do that? “I’d grown up on Shakespeare, so to have the chance to play Hamlet… I had the training, the experience.”
Either way, it was an unusual career move. Nowadays, it’s commonplace for actors to underline their commitment to the craft with a short run in London’s West End before disappearing back to Hollywood and Hollywood money. But not then. And not doing Shakespeare. One group of Japanese women bought seats for 10 consecutive shows, while others flew in from Australia, China and Argentina and chanced their luck. The Winnipeg Free Press reported Reeves’ arrival under the headline “Keanu Krazy” and launched a telephone hotline to register sightings. Reeves recall of the time is typically Reeves-ian.
“That level of dedication is incredibly rare,“ says Chad Stahelski. “It has nothing to do with being lazy or work-shy. It’s a choice. It’s about what level of commitment an actor or an actress is willing to make for a project. Keanu’s all or nothing. He’s willing to give up six months of his time to train for a role. Some people would try and get another film in, or work two. When I first met him he’d had surgery and he was doing kung-fu in this big, cold warehouse with a neck brace on. I knew he was a serious guy. That set the standard for the rest of our relationship. That YouTube footage is four months’ worth of three-gun training. In a non-movie way, what Keanu is doing in that video is competitively impressive. Real guns, real bullets, hitting real targets. If you told him to go learn how to crochet, he’d go and be an expert in that. That’s just what he’s like.”
“He can be a very monastic cat,” says Laurence Fishburne, who co-starred in The Matrix. “Particularly when he’s working. His career has not been without its failures. And that gives him a tremendous amount of grace and humility. Sometimes things have not gone well and he’s learned from these things. He understands the business he’s in, he loves acting and he considers himself grateful to be able to do it. Some of his choices are deeply personal. It’s not about, ‘How am I going to do the movie that makes all the money?’ I first saw him in River’s Edge and there was a quality I’d never experienced. It’s honesty. It’s that elusive thing called ‘star quality’. That’s part of it. But he’s also incredibly curious and intelligent. It takes intelligence to be funny. His comic timing is excellent. He’s survived because he’s managed to evolve with the business we’re in. That’s down to curiosity and intelligence.”
Some souvenirs Reeves has kept: the sword from Hamlet. The sword from 47 Ronin. Some scripts. A couple of film-set named-chair backs. The jersey he wore to play Shane Falco in the American football drama The Replacements (“which I think I may have given away to a friend”). Canned celluloid versions of My Own Private Idaho and Henry’s Crime. “I have a lovely letter from Francis [Ford Coppola].”
On day one of filming The Matrix, the cast found a gift in their hotel rooms. “A black box and inside was a red pill.” [In the first film, Thomas Anderson/Neo is asked to choose between a red and blue pill, the former leading to enlightenment and The Truth.]
Which of your films stand out as favourites? “Oh good God, man! That’s a long list.”
You’ve made some good ones. “No! I mean: off the top of my head, if I’m going to answer this question: River’s Edge, Permanent Record, Bill & Ted’s 1 and 2, Matrix trilogy, Constantine, Thumbsucker, A Scanner Darkly, Constantine, Speed…”
You’ve said Constantine twice. “Did I? Constantine… let’s give it three. John Wick, My Own Private Idaho, Generation Um…, Man of Tai Chi, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Little Buddha, Dracula. I mean, I’ve been a part of some films that are… good. You know, the directors, the scripts. All those films kind of change your life.”
“I’m every cliché,” Reeves tells me. “Fucking mortality. Ageing. I’m just starting to get better at it. Just the amount of stuff you have to do before you’re dead. I’m all of the clichés, and it’s embarrassing. It’s all of them. It’s just, ‘Oh my God. OK. Where did the time go? How come things are changing? How much time do I have left? What didn’t I do?’ I’m trying to think of the line from the sonnet… ‘And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er / The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan / Which I new pay as if not paid before’.
“So, yeah,” he smiles. “I’m that guy.”
Reeves steps outside to smoke a cigarette and I follow him. His plans for the rest of the day involve an interview about Arch Motorcycles. Then dinner with Nicolas Winding Refn. “The Neon Demon, man! I forgot The Neon Demon.” The Danish director’s latest, which opened to what might politely be called mixed reviews. “Should you see it? Of course you should see it.”
There are no filming commitments on Reeves’ immediate horizon. But, of course, something will be along soon. And it will be as surprising and cool and individual and unexpected as any number of other choices he has been making since 1986. Just don’t think that any of that stuff comes easy.
“I’m working on working. Moving the needle. I’ve got some scripts in development. Trying to get the money. Trying to get some casting.”
The Process.
“Yeah, man,” Reeves says.
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