Disney, disappointment, and how $3,000 became the making of Keanu Reeves: “No one liked me”
Everyone has to start somewhere, even time-travelling, multiverse-jumping, bearded, deadly assassin movie stars like Keanu Reeves, who has come a long way since he started off as a struggling Canadian actor with an old, beaten-up car and dreams of the big screen.
Way back in the 1980s, Reeves was a young wannabe taking on Coca-Cola adverts and minor TV roles in his home country, in danger of becoming typecast and quickly becoming disillusioned with the direction his chosen career was taking. He was also coming up against some bizarre prejudices of the time too, with some in the industry telling him his name was ‘too ethnic sounding’, forcing a brief change to using his initials instead.
He decided to take action, packing up his car and setting off to travel over the border to Los Angeles, where so many others had always headed to in order to seek fame and fortune. At the end of that decade, he recalled: “I was at a point where I had done the most I could do in Toronto. I was tired of playing the best friend, thug number one and the tall guy. I read for a ‘Disney Movie of the Week’ called Young Again. No one liked me but the director.”
Adding, “He hooked me up with (film producer) Hildy Gottlieb. I flew out to meet her and eventually got my green card. I got into my dumpy 1969 Volvo and drove here with $3,000. I stayed at my stepfather’s and proceeded to go into the darkness that is LA.”
He was just 20 years old and full of ambition, but he hadn’t lost any of the friendliness that Canadians are so known for, and shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles, Reeves was filling his Volvo with petrol when he noticed some men in ice hockey shirts who told him they were going to play street hockey.
Reeves decided to join them, and that single game turned into a ten-year tradition every weekend of the same people playing red vs black colours. He also made friendships within that group that he credited with keeping him grounded when global fame began to hit.
And he didn’t have to wait too long for that to happen. He began to pick up more prominent roles, acting with legends like Dennis Hopper in 1986’s dark thriller River’s Edge, and although he was still having to take on work for brands like Kellogg’s Cornflakes, once he landed a part in the multi-Oscar-nominated period drama Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, things began to change quickly.
The following year, he was cast alongside Alex Winter in the phone booth time-hopping comedy movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a hit film that perfectly captured the emerging slacker culture of the early 1990s and had one of the best promo taglines in “history is about to be rewritten by two guys that can’t spell”, becoming something of a cult classic and spawned two sequels, one in 1991 and another much later with Bill and Ted Face the Music in 2020.
While Reeves had more success with different genre movies like My Own Private Idaho and Bram Stoker’s Dracula over the next couple of years, it was undoubtedly 1994’s global action smash Speed that pushed his profile to megastar status, the film earning some $350million on a budget of a tenth of that amount and being nominated for three Academy Awards.
