Mystery man
Fans find a lot to love in actor Keanu Reeves’ ambiguous persona
When Keanu Reeves walked onstage at a video-game conference in Los Angeles in June, Peter Sarkisyan marveled at how the actor seemed to
transcend his earthly form.
Maybe it was Reeves’ lanky silhouette, shrouded in a cloud of smoke. Or, perhaps, it was the connection he felt with the actor, who, like Sarkisyan’s mother, was born in Lebanon and donates to cancer research.
But Reeves was the man Sarkisyan aspired to be. He cried out from his seat: “You’re breathtaking!”
“Keanu speaks truth. He’s nice to people. I just said what everyone was thinking,” Sarkisyan, an online gamer,
recalled in an interview.
Reeves has inhabited a cipherlike skin for much of his three-decade movie career, shifting from the reluctant hero of “The Matrix” series, which brought in $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, to a puppy-loving assassin in “John Wick,” and a sadlooking sandwich eater who launched a thousand memes.
People project onto the 54-year-old actor what they want to see in themselves. “There is an ambiguity about him,” said William Irwin, a philosophy professor at King’s College in WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania, who lectures about pop culture and philosophy. “He’s not androgynous. He’s not alpha male. He’s masculine and feminine in a way.”
Like Bill Murray before him, who achieved status as a sometimes secular saint three decades after “Ghostbusters,” Reeves is accessible and, at the same time, not. He is a pop icon for these times when people seek mindfulness as a way to make sense of a confusing, cynical world.
At times he is pensive, such as when talk-show host Stephen Colbert recently asked him in a half-joking tone, “What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?” The actor sighed. “I know that the ones who love us will miss us,” he replied.
It is refreshing, too, to see a celebrity so at ease with fame. In March, Reeves and others aboard a flight from San Francisco to Burbank, California, got stranded in Bakersfield. A video of a rumpled Reeves in a van reading aloud to fellow passengers was posted on Instagram.
There are prayer candles with Reeves’ image and diaries for sale on Amazon that ponder, “What Would Keanu Reeves Do?” Buzzfeed recently had the actor cuddle with puppies while answering fan questions.
And his response to Sarkisyan’s adulation was very much in keeping with what we have come to expect from the actor who defined teenage exuberance in the 1980s in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” “You’re breathtaking!” Reeves shouted from the stage, while the crowd wildly cheered. “You’re all breathtaking!”
Reeves is achingly private, and what little is known about him is plowed terrain. His father left home when he was a boy, was arrested in 1994 for drug dealing and spent two years in jail. Reeves was born in Beirut and grew up in Toronto before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting. (His mother, a costume designer, is English; his father is Chinese and Hawaiian.) In the late 1990s, he had a child with his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Syme. It was stillborn. The couple broke up and, two years later, Syme was killed in a car accident. Reeves owns a house in the Hollywood Hills and rides motorcycles. He is left-handed.
Perhaps it is his perceived vulnerability that people find so appealing. “He has his interests and pursuits, but he doesn’t have airs about him,” Irwin said. “He doesn’t pretend to be something he is not. He has a quest quality, searching.”
This year, he seemingly has been everywhere promoting “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” his first No. 1 box-office hit in 11 years; Netflix’s “Always Be My Maybe,” in which he plays a parody of himself; “Toy Story 4,” in which he voices the character Duke Caboom; and the recently announced third installment in the “Bill & Ted” movies, due in theaters in August 2020, more than 30 years after the first.
But stories about his Everyman quality abounded long before this recent spate of publicity. In 2014, actress Olivia Spencer told talkshow host Meredith Vieira that Reeves had helped push her car when it had broken down on a Los Angeles street. Nearly a decade ago, he was filmed giving up his seat on the subway to a woman carrying a heavy bag.
At the “Toy Story 4” premiere in June, an interviewer asked Reeves about his latest online persona: the internet’s boyfriend.
“I’ve been dubbed what?” he asked.
“Everyone is just kind of gushing over you on the internet,” the interviewer said.
Reeves shifted and stared at the red carpet. “That’s, uh, that’s wacky,” he replied.
Ever mindful, he added: “Well, the positivity’s great, you know.”