Keanu Reeves’ career-long obsession with playing guys called John
You can’t call your kid Keanu Reeves and not expect them to turn out really cool. If you were writing a detective novel and gave that name to your main character, the publishers would tell you to change it because it sounds too made up. Is it any wonder that he’s gone on to have the career he’s had? He had a massive advantage straight out of the gate.
This trend continues when you look at the names of his characters. Thomas Anderson isn’t much of a name, but Neo? Now we’re cooking. In Dangerous Liaisons, he played a French nobleman whose full name was ‘Le Chevalier Raphael Danceny’, and he lent his name to the fictional stuntman Duke Kaboom in Toy Story 4. However, there is one really basic name that the Canadian heartthrob just can’t seem to escape.
On the Keanu Reeves subreddit (of course, there’s a Keanu Reeves subreddit), an unknown user posed a very valid question – “Why does he [Reeves] play so many characters called John/Jon?” This might seem like a bit of stupid internet banter, but if you look at his filmography, strange trends begin to appear.
Across his career, Reeves has played somebody with a variation on the name ‘Jonathan’ in 11 movies. If you chuck in the two times he’s played a ‘Jack’ in films and TV, plus the character of Johnny Silverhand from the video game Cyberpunk 2077, that’s 14 times that Reeves has donned the common moniker. It’s technically 15 if you include the appearance of Jack Traven from Speed in the first ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ movie, but you can decide amongst yourselves if that counts.
The first time he took on the name was in Kathryn Bigelow’s homoerotic surfing classic Point Break. He plays a character named Johnny Utah, opposite Patrick Swayze’s ‘Bodhisattva’. John Wick does a lot of the heavy lifting. Reeves has portrayed the sharp-suited hitman in four of his own films, plus a cameo in the recent spin-off Ballerina. He took on a more classical John when he played Jonathan Harker in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and played a version of the Shakespearian villain Don John in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. There’s the aforementioned Jack Traven, who attempted to control the ‘Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down’, while his other ‘Jack’ comes from the made-for-television Christmas movie, Babes in Toyland.
Why has this happened to Keanu so many times? There’s every chance that Hollywood screenwriters are just lazy, falling back on the same first name over and over again so they don’t have to think about it too much. ‘John’ is clearly a popular name for action heroes; John McClane from Die Hard; John Rambo from First Blood; John Matrix in Commando. Reeves tends to take these kinds of badass roles, so maybe an abundance of ‘Johns’ was always in his future. Let’s not rule out the possibility that the actor just likes the name. When you go through your whole life with an unusual first name, perhaps a more conventional one seems more appealing.
With Reeves showing no signs of packing things up any time soon, his list of ‘Johns etc.’ could get even bigger. He’s spoken about wanting to play John Constantine again, and the Wick franchise seems like the sort of thing that could go on forever. Watch this space.
