EXCELLENT
Stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, now both 55, party on with Bill and Ted movie franchise
In the chronicles of late-20th-century popular culture, you will find few friends as excellent as Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan. • The dopey Southern California
dudes and bandmates always stood faithfully alongside each other, whether bumbling through time in their 1989 film debut,
“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” or wheedling themselves
out of the afterlife in the 1991 sequel, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.”
• These movies helped bring a bodacious bounty of slang into the wider lexicon while providing early career boosts to their leading men, Alex Winter (Bill) and Keanu Reeves (Ted).
Three decades later, the actors, both 55, have remained close friends themselves. Reeves is now the star of franchises such as “The Matrix” and “John Wick,” and Winter is a director of documentaries such as “Showbiz Kids” and the upcoming “Zappa.”
But they are forever connected by “Bill & Ted,” and the fact that they genuinely like each other, as they explained in a Zoom conversation earlier this summer.
Now they are reuniting in a third film, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” which, after a lengthy and occasionally heinous development process, will be released on demand and in theaters on Aug. 28. The new movie, written by “Bill & Ted” creators Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and directed by Dean Parisot (“Galaxy Quest”), finds the title characters muddling through middle age, still chasing their unfulfilled dream of uniting the world with their music — this time with the help of their daughters.
Reeves and Winter spoke about their enduring bond, the making of “Face the Music” and more. These are edited excerpts from that conversation, dude:
Question: You both started acting when you were young. Had you ever crossed paths before you made “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”?
Keanu Reeves: Nope!
Alex Winter: We met in the audition process. Keanu had come to Hollywood from Toronto. I had come from New York.
Reeves: I turned professional when I was 15, 16. Al, you first got paid when you were, what, 5?
Winter: 8. (Laughter)
Reeves: We both grew up in show business.
Winter: We hit it off early on in the audition. We had similar training and similar interests, about acting and drama and the plays we liked.
Reeves: And cinema!
Winter: When they told us we both got the part, we were both like, “Ah, that’s great that you got it.” It’s like when you start at a new school, you’re like, “Oh great, you’re going to be in my class.” It was that vibe.
Q: What was the spirit like when the film went into production?
Winter: Everybody involved was super-young. The director, Stephen Herek, was in his late 20s. (Writers) Chris and Ed were only a few years older than Keanu and myself. Everybody didn’t know what the hell they were doing.
Reeves: But Stephen Herek had a real vision and we were all on board. Tonally, no one was off on their own. Let’s make this real, but it’s hyper-reality. Bill and Ted were Chris and Ed’s characters, but they really let us have our voice.
Q: Was it meaningful to you that you got to work with George Carlin, who played Rufus, your time-traveling guardian?
Winter: We didn’t know who Rufus was going to be until well into shooting, and it was scary. There were names that were being floated around — they were great actors, but just not right for that role. Scott Kroopf, a producer of the ‘‘Bill & Ted’’ series, had worked with Carlin before, so that was where he came in. Keanu and I were blown away that it was George. He was an extremely grounded, down-to-earth person offcamera. And I would say he was very charitably nice to both of us. (Laughter) We were well aware of the gravitas of having him.
Q: Did the release of the film have a noticeable impact on your lives? Reeves: I was just happy it came out. Winter: DEG, the film’s original distributor, went bankrupt, and it got shelved for a year. We were told it was never, ever going to come out, ever. So we went on with our lives and careers. Then it was bought in a fire sale by a company called Nelson Entertainment. They had done a test of the movie and it had done incredibly well. I was shooting a Butthole Surfers video in Austin the weekend it came out. I got a call from my agent to get a copy of Variety. There was a picture of me and Keanu, like really cheesy, sitting on top of a giant pile of cash. I remember thinking, well, someone’s making money off this. I guess that’s nice for them.
Reeves: I don’t know where I was when it was released. After a while, I would just have people calling from the streets, like, “Excellent!” “Be excellent!” There was an affection for it.
Winter: I was in France on a vacation that summer and heard kids in the Champs-elysees skating and talking like Bill and Ted with thick French accents. I was like, “Oh, OK, this thing is having some kind of impact.”
Reeves: Our personal lives changed a little bit. When we would go out to dinner together, people were like, excitedly “Whoa! Dudes!” We would just be like, blandly “Yeah. Yeah.” “Party on, dudes!” “Yeah.”
Winter: I remember somebody doing an air-guitar slide on their knees, all the way across the floor of the restaurant up to our bar stools. I remember saying to Keanu, “You realize that this — no matter what happens — is never going to stop.” (Laughter)
Winter: That door ain’t closing anyway. (Laughter) I mean, it could be worse. I remember walking down the street with Alan Rickman once. A fan came up to us, and afterwards Alan was like, “You’re so lucky that you’re known for playing Bill and not Hans Gruber the terrorist. People come up to me and spit in my face. They come up to you and tell you how much they love you.”
Q: Was there a different energy on the set of “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”?
Reeves: I had just come from shooting 88 days playing Johnny Utah in “Point Break.” And then I was playing Ted. So that was a bit wacky.
Winter: And “My Own Private Idaho.”
Reeves: Right! So it was “Point Break,” “Private Idaho” and then “Bogus Journey.”
Winter: Some of “Bogus Journey” grew out of the fact that on “Bill and Ted,” Keanu and I and Chris and Ed would riff, off-camera, on all kinds of subjects. They were writing for us now, which was a benefit. We could make something that was more physical, more linguistically complicated, and plot-wise, much more far out.
Q: What took so long to get “Bill & Ted Face the Music” made?
Winter: Oy. Where to begin? Reeves: It’s show business, right? Many moons ago, the writers had an idea. And we said, “Yes, that’s a good idea. Let’s go try and do it.” Then we brought on a producer, then we found a director. And then we got into the
business.
Winter: (makes squealing noise) That’s a record scratch. (Laughter) To the fans, it was a no-brainer. To the marketplace, the movies have never been a no-brainer until they come out.
Reeves: There’s a lot of, um, creative and business challenges to bringing it on-screen.
Q: Did the movie always center on the idea of Bill and Ted growing up to be middle-age losers?
Reeves: That’s been the core premise from the very beginning — of course that’s what would happen.
Winter: That was the heart, the comic engine that we responded to in the first place. The longer it took us to get it made, in a way, the funnier that got.
Q: Not to spoil anything, but your post-credits scene in “Face the Music” seems to reveal the extent of your devotion to the roles and to each other.
Reeves: Oh, you got that!
Winter: And it was the very, very last thing that he and I shot, which was great. The makeup was protracted and excruciating, but other than that, it was really sweet to do that at the end. That was our martini.