Ana de Armas’ awkward first encounter with Keanu Reeves: “That will never not be embarrassing”
In an industry where it seems like everyone has a skeleton in their closet, nobody seems to have a bad word to say about Keanu Reeves, who is not only a talented actor with numerous hits under his belt but is truly the best of us.
One of the things that has helped secure Reeves’ legacy to a modern audience is John Wick. Ever since the Canadian stepped into the custom shoes of the ‘Baba Yaga’ in 2014 (with a huge assist from Eva Longoria), he has reinvented himself as one of the last bastions of the classic action movie formula.
The original movie led to three sequels, a TV show, a prequel comic book series, and, in 2025, a spin-off movie, which was Ballerina, or From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, because the marketing team really wanted everyone to know this was a John Wick movie.
Inspired by a scene in the third movie, the film follows a ballet dancer/assassin named Eve Macarro, played by Ana De Armas. In the revenge movie style of the first film, Eve is out to avenge the death of her father and does so by punching, kicking, and generally battering approximately 12 million people over the course of two hours.
This wasn’t the first time the two had crossed paths, however, as they were both involved in Knock Knock, a 2015 horror movie directed by Eli Roth. This was de Armas’ first major Hollywood role, playing one of two women who arrive in the middle of the night at the house of a middle-aged family man (Reeves). Prior to filming, the cast and crew of the movie all met for dinner, in which the subject of The Matrix came up. What followed was one of the most humiliating moments of de Armas’ life.
“[Reeves] looked at me and asked me if I had seen it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, “I was like, ‘The Matrix? No’. Everyone at the table was shocked, so someone came to me and told me in Spanish. ‘You haven’t seen La Matrix?’ I was, like, ‘Oh, La Matrix. Yeah, I have seen that one’. That will never not be embarrassing.”
Born and raised in Cuba, de Armas famously didn’t speak much English before moving to Hollywood. She explained that she was struggling to follow the conversation and that the Matrix question caught her completely off-guard. Luckily for her, Reeves didn’t mind. The conversation quickly moved on to John Wick, which the national treasure was much more interested in.
“He got up from his chair, and he started doing one of the choreographies,” de Armas continued, “I believe it was the one in the bathhouse”.
It’s unknown if this incident was brought up when Reeves and de Armas shared a scene in Ballerina many years later, but let’s hope for her sake that it wasn’t.
