How a movie Keanu Reeves didn’t even make derailed his career: “It’s only a theory”
When looking at the careers of faltering Hollywood stars from a bird’s eye view, it’s often easy to see which movies derailed their ascent. After all, if a star seems to be on the rise, but then they’re part of a film that is critically reviled and tanks at the box office, that’s an obvious momentum killer. However, some situations are much less apparent to the naked eye. In fact, sometimes a career can be derailed by a movie that a star doesn’t make – and Keanu Reeves believes that’s precisely what happened to him in the 1990s.
In 1994, Reeves starred in a movie that cemented his status as an A-list action star. Up until the release of Speed, a breakneck thriller that few observers in Hollywood predicted to be as enormous a hit as it was, Reeves had only dabbled in action once: 1991’s Point Break. Aside from that, he was best known for playing the loveably dimwitted Ted Logan in the Bill & Ted movies, in addition to indie movies like My Own Private Idaho and his ill-advised turn in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Speed was such an enormous success, though, that 20th Century Fox wanted to get a sequel into development as soon as possible. The studio was adamant that Reeves reprise his role as the buzzcut-wearing LAPD officer Jack Traven in the sequel and offered the star a massive $12million to persuade him to sign up. However, by the time Speed 2: Cruise Control was ready to go into production, Reeves was exhausted from making two action movies – Johnny Mnemonic and Chain Reaction – in quick succession.
“It was a tough decision,” Reeves told Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist. “I really had an amazing time filming and making Speed. It did pretty well, so there was a, ‘Let’s do it again.’ Then I was doing a film at the time called Chain Reaction, and I was in Chicago, and I read the script. That film was pretty physical. It was a lot of running and cold.”
Even worse, though, Reeves was baffled by the script for Speed 2. He mused, “They showed me the script, and I just didn’t see it. I didn’t get it. So, I couldn’t do it.” This was a much more diplomatic recounting of his feelings than the version he gave Jimmy Kimmel in 2015, though. That time, he grimaced, “I read the script, and I was like, ‘Ugggghhh.’ It was about a cruise ship, and I was thinking, ‘A bus, a cruise ship…Speed…bus. But then a cruise ship is even slower than a bus, and I was like, ‘I love you guys, but I just can’t do it.'”
In the end, Speed 2 was every bit as abysmal as Reeves had feared from perusing the script. That wasn’t his problem, though, because after he said “No, thanks” to Fox, he made The Devil’s Advocate with Al Pacino and toured with his band Dogstar. Everything should have looked rosy for Reeves – but to his chagrin, he believed Fox was so “furious” with his decision that it released “propaganda” to the media that he’d turned the movie down purely for the Dogstar tour.
In Reeves’ opinion, Fox subsequently held a grudge against him for 11 years, as it took until 2008’s The Day the Earth Stood Still for him to make a movie for the studio again. Amusingly, though, in Reeves’ head, the ban Fox imposed on his presence in its films lasted even longer than that.
“I didn’t work at Fox for 15 years after that,” Reeves told Geist, inadvertently adding a few years on for good measure. “I believe so, but I don’t know. It’s only a theory. I ended up working there again, but it took 15 years.”
