The books Keanu Reeves needed to read for ‘The Matrix’
The iconic film roles of Keanu Reeves are many in number. We can never forget his brilliant performance in one of the greatest action movies of all time, Point Break, nor his recent efforts as the reluctant titular badass assassin in John Wick. But of all Reeves’ efforts, he will likely always be Thomas Anderson/Neo from the Wachowskis’ 1999 science-fiction action film The Matrix.
Reeves’ character was so intriguing that when the original film was released, he had many of us question our own reality; such was the strength of the Wachowskis’ writing. We can simply never forget the first moments we saw Thomas Anderson realise that the world in which he lived was not what it had always seemed.
In the behind-the-scenes documentary film The Matrix Revisited, Reeves explained that before he was even allowed to read the script that the Wachowskis had written, he first had to make his way through a set reading list first, which included some weighty tomes indeed.
“They said, ‘OK, we’d like you to play Thomas Anderson/Neo.’ I had to read Baudrillard. I had to read Out of Control, which was about systems, evolution, and robots. And then there was another book which was Evolutionary Psychology. Those there the three books they wanted me to read before I even opened up the script.”
The book by French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard is his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard explores how the ever-changing relationship between reality, society and the symbols of humankind’s creation affects our cultural standing and how it creates a shared human existence.
Kevin Kelly’s 1992 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World focuses on the complex systems in which we live and explores themes of cybernetics and chaos theory. In some ways, Kelly argues that the many fields of philosophy and theory all attempt to explain the same thing, much in the same way that the separate structures of a beehive are all essential to the same goal.
Finally, Dylan Evans’ book Introducing Evolutionary Psychology is, as you can imagine, an introductory beginner’s guide to the study of, well, evolutionary psychology. It features helpful illustrations by artists Oscar Zarate and examines questions such as “how did the mind evolve?”, “does it differ from our ancestors’ minds?” and “what are the universal features of the human mind?”.
The books Keanu Reeves read for The Matrix:
- Kevin Kelly – Out of Control
- Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
- Dylan Evans – Introducing Evolutionary Psychology
