GODS AMONG US This month: The perpetually underestimated poet-warrior KEANU REEVES
In our regular series, we pay tribute to the towering, megawatt stars who still roam Hollywood
BACKGROUNDED BY DARKNESS and the silhouette of trees, best friends Mike and Scott sit fireside like a couple of cowboys in an old Western. Mike confesses his love to Scott, but the love is unrequited, or maybe repressed; either way, Mike is bereft, but Scott offers kindness and acceptance, a quiet hug. Later on in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Keanu Reeves’ Scott will leave River Phoenix’s Mike behind, transforming from loving confidant to cold politician’s son. Reeves plays Scott Favor as warm and present, yet unknowable. Caring, yet calculating. Scott is not a villain, but certainly a shade darker for Reeves so early in his career. The character’s twofold nature augured the kind of roles Reeves would shine in down the line, a snapshot capturing the full spectrum of the actor’s range.
Despite nuanced performances like this, Keanu Reeves would be haunted by a single indelible image for several years: that of Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan. A character who Reeves played first in 1989 to such perfection that, for many, he became Ted. The punishment for his most excellent performance is that his work has been misunderstood and underestimated by a contingent of vocal critics who’ve mistaken him for just one of his countless characters. Considering the calibre of filmmakers Reeves has worked with, from Coppola to Bigelow, it’s a hang-up that seems to belong to journalists exclusively. A 1994 piece in The Observer referred to him as “a not-too-deephunk” in the headline, its writer suggesting, “He is a pretty face that is just a pretty face.” It seemed like Reeves might be doomed forever — or at least for a while — to be the San Dimas doofus.
But Reeves is, and has always been, much more than that. A leading man, a character actor, an action star. He’s beaten Death and the Devil. Been to hell and back. Saved the world a few times. He’s played in just about every genre: comedies, dramas, romcoms, sci-fi, sci-fi romcoms, period pieces, thrillers, actioners, horror, noir, mumblecore. Across three decades, he’s headlined three revered franchises. From
Shakespeare to kung fu, indie films to blockbusters, he’s never really been pigeonholed or typecast, despite our best efforts.
His otherworldly quality has made him perfect for, well, other worlds, in roles like an occult detective, a hacker messiah, the alien Klaatu, the son of Satan, a mnemonic courier, a postapocalyptic cult leader, a grieving assassin in a noir fantasy, even the Buddha. Heroes, antiheroes, underdogs, Byronic heroes, straight-up villains: he convinces as both The One and the Everyman, Good Ted and Evil Ted. While he played Speed’s man of action, Jack Traven, he learned lines for Shakespeare’s man of inaction, Hamlet. And he possesses an inherent likeability that deepens each of his characters, heightening the pathos of his tragic heroes, adding complexity to his villains. Though Ted Logan has been seared onto our retinas, Keanu Reeves has played it all: devils, saviours and men caught somewhere in-between.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, to English costume designer Patricia Taylor and Chinese-hawaiian father Samuel Nowlin Reeves, Keanu Reeves bounced around everywhere from Sydney to New York City, finally landing in Toronto, where he spent most of his youth. Reeves didn’t consider himself a good student: he struggled with reading because he was dyslexic and describes himself as a high-energy youngster. “I did a lot of pretending as a child. It was my way of coping with the fact that I didn’t really feel like I fit in,” he said in
The London Magazine. “But when I was 15, I started doing some acting and I got hooked, because it was like hockey in that it allowed me to be somebody different.” He’d considered a career in ice hockey, even earning the nickname ‘The Wall’ for being such an effective goalie, but playing Mercutio in a student production of Romeo And Juliet changed his mind and nabbed him an agent. As Reeves told Premiere in 2005, “The story I tell is being 15 and going up to my mother and saying, ‘Is it okay if I become an actor?’ And she said, ‘Of course.’”
After attending four different high schools, Reeves dropped out when he was 16 to act. His
first commercial was for Coca-cola, for which he played a cyclist, going full Method and shaving his legs for the part. He’d also been a correspondent for a Canadian news show for kids called Going Great, where he reported on everything from teddy-bear conventions to horseback riding lessons. Shortly thereafter, he began taking acting classes at night in New York, driving eight hours to attend them. When he finally moved to Los Angeles to pursue his career in 1986, all he had was $3,000 and a 1969 British racing-green Volvo.
One writer for USA Today insisted Reeves only played “dopes” in the early years, but it wasn’t quite so simple. There were certainly stoners, ne’er-do-wells, disaffected youths. The teenage outsider was a role he played well, but it wasn’t the only character he could play. Some critics saw his potential early on: the
Toronto Sun even called him a “budding De Niro”. In Permanent Record, he was a young man grappling with the suicide of a friend, a time-travelling babe-in-the-woods in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a sweet music teacher in Dangerous Liaisons, and a stoner with a troubled conscience in his bleak breakthrough, River’s Edge. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, his most maligned role, Reeves’ greatest offence is that his Jonathan Harker is quiet among actors at full volume, his restraint out of place in an otherwise operatic production. But Coppola had wanted a matinée idol for Harker, and there was no better man for the job than Keanu Reeves.
In 1989’s Parenthood, Reeves played Tod Higgins, the teenage boyfriend of Martha Plimpton’s Julie. Tod is a thorn in the side of Julie’s mother, Helen (Dianne Wiest). But he
surprises Helen when he susses out what’s been troubling her young son Garry (Joaquin Phoenix), and Helen says maybe Garry needs a man around. Toying idly with a carton of milk in Helen’s kitchen, Tod says it depends on the man, and wonders what makes a good father, revealing to Helen that his own father abused him. In this scene, Reeves seamlessly transitions from Tod the child to Tod the man and back, from buoyant to melancholy in an instant, imparting layers to a seemingly one-dimensional character. It’s an unexpected, redemptive moment. There is a glimpse of wisdom and of vulnerability, with selfawareness and humour. It’s a testament to Reeves’ talent that he can play the (supposed) fool with such subtlety and pathos.
Reeves defied the “dope” label once again when he did Shakespeare in the early ’90s: first as Don John in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, his debut as a villain, and then again in My Own Private Idaho. Gus Van Sant’s film was like Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’ for street hustlers, with Reeves’ Scott as its Prince Hal. Should anyone doubt Reeves’ abilities and range, My Own Private Idaho is Defence Exhibit A. In 1991 alone, Reeves did Van Sant’s poignant drama, comedy, and his first action film.
Keanu Reeves has helped fundamentally alter modern American actioners for the better, and it all began with Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow’s sun-kissed tribute to adrenaline and sublimated male desire. With FBI Agent Johnny Utah, Bigelow broke Reeves away from his disaffected teen characters. It’s the film that proved he was a bona fide action star, and his casting was a hard-won battle waged by Bigelow, whose faith in the young actor was rewarded in spades.
At the time, Bigelow told the Los Angeles Times, “I think there’s a purity and an innocence to him that translates — which, coupled with a very strong persona, is a winning combination.” Bigelow was not the only filmmaker to recognise this quality. Bernardo Bertolucci said his “impossible innocence” inspired the filmmaker to cast Keanu as Prince Siddhartha in Little Buddha, and Richard Linklater would identify it years later when he chose him as his lead in A Scanner Darkly. Reeves himself understood it, telling a Premiere interviewer in 1994 that he was “the kind of male equivalent of the female ingénue. I’ve always played innocents... My career through-line is innocence, in a variety of different genres.”
And 1994’s Speed was his coming-ofage film, his official cinematic transition away from “impossible innocence” into adulthood. If Point Break made Reeves an action star, then Speed made him a megastar, a household name. The film’s success made critics believe he could be the heir to the Schwarzenegger/stallone throne. But he was not like the action stars of yore, not even really like Van Damme or Seagal. Arnie’s and Sly’s trademarks were giant muscles and punching — as filmmaker, second-unit director and Reeves’ former stunt double Chad Stahelski explained to Vulture, “Americans worshipped one big power punch.” But that just wasn’t Reeves’ style.
Where Die Hard’s John Mcclane was wisecracking and confident, Jack Traven is all earnestness and concern for others. And this was by Reeves’ design: he pushed for his character to be less like Mcclane and more like a polite, conscientious man sincerely concerned with keeping people alive. Producer and Guardian critic Lizzie Francke wrote that his persona “redefines our ideas of masculinity, his physical presence a beguiling mix of sweat and sensitivity”. His persona also helped redefine our ideas of an action star.
Speed director Jan de Bont had already worked with the likes of Willis and Stallone, but he wanted a new face, someone both strong and sensitive, more like “a real person”. De Bont told W Magazine, “What makes [Reeves] stand out is that he dares to let emotions show. He has a vulnerable quality — if you had a daughter, you’d let him take her out. A little old-fashioned, chivalrous. We’ve had enough cartoony type action heroes.”
20th Century Fox knew they had a star, casting him in 1995’s A Walk In The Clouds and 1996’s Chain Reaction. But Reeves turned down Fox’s Speed 2: Cruise Control for a cool $12 million, partly because of an injury, but also because he predicted the film would be catastrophically bad. (He has, of course, been vindicated.) As Reeves once recalled, he told William Mechanic, the head of Fox Filmed Entertainment at the time, “If I do this film, I will not come back up. You guys will send me to the bottom of the ocean and I will not make it back up again.” Reeves felt like he was fighting for his life. Around the same time, he would also blow off Cutthroat Island (like most of the other leading men in Hollywood) and Heat (he would have played the Val Kilmer role).
Instead, Reeves went to Canada, where he played Hamlet at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre for less than $2,000 a week. Reeves made the fatal mistake of doing what served him as an actor, and what interested him as a human being. So 20th Century Fox put Reeves on ice, not working with him again until 2008’s
The Day the Earth Stood Still. “Sometimes
I call that ‘The Day My Career Stood Still’,” Reeves told Esquire in 2017. “I kind of went to Studio Movie Jail.”
Ultimately, Keanu Reeves didn’t need 20th Century Fox after all, because in 1999 he starred in The Matrix. It was a role turned down by Brad Pitt, Will Smith, Leonardo Dicaprio, even Sandra Bullock, but it’s impossible now to imagine anyone else as Neo. The movie changed everything — not just action films, but filmmaking in general. Alongside the Wachowski sisters and legendary action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, Reeves helped revolutionise and transform American action cinema. As Chad Stahelski explained about the era to Vulture, “Just look at the martial-arts genre. It had never breached the mainstream before. You would not see a Stallone movie, or a Schwarzenegger movie, or a Bruce Willis movie where martial arts were prominent... Our action heroes didn’t do it.” Action films used to centre chase scenes; in a post-matrix world, though, big action sequences are now designed around their fights.
The Matrix was smart, elegant, prescient. It altered the perception that Keanu Reeves himself was the innocent he’d played so well — Neo begins naive, but transforms into saviour, philosopher, kung-fu master. It may have been what finally opened him up to roles that played with, subverted, or otherwise complicated his innocence, like John Constantine in Constantine and Bob Arctor in A Scanner Darkly. Both films are portraits of fractured characters battling existential lostness, alienation, and demons both literal and figurative. One man is torn between two identities, the other between heaven and hell.
In Constantine, Reeves plays a detective, a kind of damned Philip Marlowe seeking salvation. His heartbreaking turn as Bob Arctor in Richard Linklater’s adaptation of A Scanner Darkly came a year later. Philip K. Dick’s work perfectly complements Reeves, its dystopia representing the kind of other world that the actor so perfectly inhabits. “What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself,” Reeves’ Arctor wonders in his smoke-deepened voice, meditating on the surveillance equipment that fills his home. Arctor is an undercover cop so addicted to the mysterious drug Substance D that he’s losing his identity. In luminous, rotoscoped close-ups, he articulates his confusion to us in monologue. With both Arctor and Constantine, Keanu Reeves gives two of his best, most haunting performances.
While not exactly a formative moment for the action genre, 47 Ronin serves as connective tissue between The Matrix and Reeves’ 2013 directorial debut, the vastly underrated Man Of Tai Chi, wherein he ingeniously cast himself as villain Donaka Mark and cast Tiger Chen, martial artist, stuntman, and Reeves’ personal trainer from The Matrix, as his leading man. The 21st century had ushered in a new era for Keanu Reeves as he began playing darker characters, even outright villains. The shift first came when he played a serial killer and an abusive husband in The Watcher and The Gift respectively. Street Kings’ dirty cop Tom Ludlow was a far cry from Speed’s Jack Traven. Donaka Mark feels like a role Reeves was born to play: vampiric and over-the-top, the former Jonathan Harker now doing a pitch-perfect portrayal of Dracula.
At the heart of Man Of Tai Chi is a story about a man’s struggle between light and dark. Discussing the film, Reeves said he used the ideas of tai chi to explore story and character: “the yin and the yang, the masculine and feminine, the inclusive, the exclusive, the physical side of it, the spiritual side of it”, all of which offered “conflicts, contradictions”. He could have been describing himself and his work. Keanu Reeves plays characters who are
at peace with — or at odds with — this duality, a truth that becomes even more evident in 2014’s John Wick.
John Wick was an underdog of a film, a surprise success about an ex-hitman who comes out of retirement after his wife passes to avenge the death of the puppy she gave him as a final gift. Reeves thought of it more as a story about grief than revenge, relating it to his own personal bereavements, and within the role, he expresses suffering both elemental and elegant. For Reeves, action films are not about spectacle, but emotion. When asked by The Sydney Morning Herald what makes a good cinematic assassin, Keanu answered, “They tend to have a vulnerability to them, even the Mifunes, the samurai. You need to give them some loneliness, some tragedy.” And he imbues John Wick with exactly this.
As widower John, he is sympathetic and relatable, an Everyman. As John Wick, he is otherworldly and enigmatic, a Byronic hero. He is Toshiro Mifune with a touch of Gene Kelly. In her essay ‘The Grace Of Keanu Reeves’, critic Angelica Jade Bastién says, “John Wick synthesises Keanu’s greatness – his central, thematic loneliness; his command of physicality and stillness; and his peculiarly vulnerable masculinity.”
John Wick is, in truth, the culmination of Reeves’ career, its apotheosis, a true showcase of his talents as an actor and a collaborator and an action star. It’s Reeves as warrior, terse poet, mythic figure, and perfect straight man. (The film’s seriousness is balanced out with a pulpy sense of humour, a wink at the camera.) In John, there’s even a touch of the truehearted love interest he plays so well in movies like The Lake House and Something’s Gotta Give. It’s the perfect illustration of his duality: Reeves can be both soft and hard, vulnerable and menacing, innocent and world-weary, open and unknowable. For John Wick, Reeves brings it all together.
Through the lens of John Wick, we can now view Keanu Reeves’ body of work in sharpened focus. We see an unconventional, versatile leading man who makes eclectic and unexpected choices based on passion, not pay cheques. A cipher, an outsider, a matinée idol, a mystery. A creative force and extraordinarily dedicated performer who’s transformed the landscape of film. Reeves recently reprised his role as Ted in Bill & Ted Face The Music, and with a fourth Matrix and at least two more instalments of John Wick on the way, this means he will have revisited all three sagas he helped launch in the span of just a few years — further proof of his abiding appeal.
He once joked that he worried “He Played Ted” would be etched on his tombstone. But throughout his enduring career, the actor has experimented, evolved, and shown us once and for all that Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan is just one of the many faces of Keanu.