The day Keanu Reeves crashed the set of the 2009 movie he was forced to turn down: “It looks amazing!”
Most actors would keep their distance from a movie they desperately wanted to be in but found themselves unable to commit to, but not Keanu Reeves, who crashed the set to have a gander.
Scheduling conflicts have been the scourge of many stars and filmmakers, and it’s even crueller that the part he was offered was one of the main roles in a picture that had finally escaped from development hell after two decades, and he still couldn’t get a look-in.
To make matters even worse, the film he ended up making instead was so poorly received that Reeves acknowledged it came dangerously close to derailing him as a mainstream leading man. If that wasn’t bad enough, the role that got away even adversely affected the movie he’d made immediately before the one he had to turn down his dream gig to make.
In February 2008, it was announced that David Ayer’s crime thriller, formerly known as The Night Watchman, had been retitled as Street Kings, which was largely interpreted as a pre-emptive move to distance itself from Zack Snyder’s comic book adaptation, Watchmen, which was in the midst of production.
The long-gestating superhero flick had started shooting in September 2007, putting an end to one of the most torturous and cursed developments in modern Hollywood history. The downside was that Reeves, who’d been offered the part of Dr Manhattan, had already signed on to shoot Scott Derrickson’s The Day the Earth Stood Still remake.
The sci-fi redux, which the actor would retrospectively deem ‘The Day My Career Stood Still’, began filming in December 2007. Since both films had made Vancouver Film Studios their base of operations, Reeves, seemingly a glutton for punishment, wandered down to see what was going on.
When asked if he was supposed to play Dr Manhattan, the Matrix and Point Break star answered in the affirmative. “Yeah, absolutely,” he confirmed. “It just didn’t work out.” He acknowledged that the conflict created by The Day the Earth Stood Still was responsible, but in his spare time, he sauntered down to the Watchmen set to see how his replacement, Billy Crudup, was getting on.
“Man, I went to the set,” he remarked. “They were shooting in Vancouver while we were filming, so I went over to the set to say hi. They showed me some stuff, and it looks amazing! I can’t wait. It’s going to be so killer, man!” A typically upbeat response from the most wholesome man in the business, but Watchmen was not, in fact, so killer, man.
Regardless, audiences were robbed of the chance to see Reeves playing a muscular, bald, bright blue superhero who spends much of the movie with his CGI knob hanging out, if that’s even the right word, all things considered. To add insult to injury, The Day the Earth Stood Still was shite.
