The Iron Maiden song inspired by a 2005 Keanu Reeves movie: “That’s a straightforward nick”
What do Keanu Reeves and Iron Maiden have in common? For the most part, absolutely nothing, apart from that one song that Bruce Dickinson admitted was ripped off from one of the actor’s movies.
Obviously, Reeves and music go hand-in-hand, with the most beloved man in Hollywood being a lifelong bass player and aficionado with close ties to the industry, with the most notable connection being that time he wore Dolly Parton’s original 1978 Playboy cover outfit as a Halloween costume, which was designed by his mother.
The Point Break, Speed, and The Matrix lead has always favoured punk over heavy metal, but he nonetheless impacted the legendary British metal band when Dickinson and the lads were putting together their 17th studio album, Senjutsu, with one song derived from a character that Reeves ironically faced some initial backlash for playing.
In the source material, Hellblazer‘s John Constantine is blonde and British, and in Francis Lawrence’s 2005 blockbuster, he’s decidedly non-blonde, non-British, and looks, sounds, and acts a lot like Keanu Reeves. As tends to be the case, some of the more diehard comic book fans weren’t thrilled with the change, but $230 million at the box office would indicate that they were in the minority.
It’s a role that the star has always held close to his heart, and despite two decades of false starts, failed attempts, and wishful thinking, the sequel that he’s been desperate to realise remains no further to fruition, with the ball firmly in the court of DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn, who seems unwilling to play.
On the plus side, even after the TV series of the same name, starring bottle-blonde Welshman Matt Ryan in the title role, was cancelled, the spirit of Constantine and Hellblazer lived on through ‘Days of Future Past’, the fifth, shortest, and possibly the best track on Senjutsu.
Even though the title is identical to another famous superhero property, with an X-Men comic book run and feature film bearing the same name, Dickinson clarified that it was another splash page favourite who inspired the song, albeit with the concept of Constantine’s occult investigations flipped on its head.
“Actually, that’s a straightforward nick from the graphic novel Constantine, that got made into the film of the same name with Keanu Reeves,” the frontman clarified. “I thought it would be interesting to turn it on its head, the situation in which he found himself in as a person who is destined to walk the earth until he gets his shit together.”
With the song, Iron Maiden wanted to answer two burning questions. One: “Well, hang on a minute, just exactly who appointed God to do this in the first place?” And two: “What right does he have to pull all this crap on people?” Those are mysteries that Reeves didn’t answer in Constantine, but Dickinson tried his best to do it with ‘Days of Future Past’.
