Keanu Reeves’ love for the terrible movie that got him cast in ‘The Matrix’: “I enjoyed it”
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s mind-boggling that so many actors turned down the chance to headline The Matrix before Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Laurence Fishburne were tasked to lead the Wachowskis’ game-changing sci-fi epic.
That said, it can’t have been an easy sell. Two sibling filmmakers who’d only helmed one feature that flopped at the box office had pitched an expensive, ambitious, and dizzying combination of martial arts, cyberpunk, existentialism, and philosophy, all wrapped up in an effects-heavy bow that would push the technological boundaries of cinema to new limits.
If anything, the most difficult part was trying to source an ensemble. Once Warner Bros had agreed to foot the bill, the Wachowskis set their sights high and aimed for the stars. Unfortunately, the biggest names in Hollywood weren’t interested. Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and even Sandra Bullock turned down the role of Neo, with Val Kilmer, Janet Jackson, and Salma Hayek also in the mix for Trinity and Morpheus.
Of course, the most famous ‘what if’ by far was Will Smith. He was already the most famous star in the business, and Neo was his if he wanted it. He didn’t, and he decided he’d be better off headlining Wild Wild West, a reunion with his Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld that carried the additional pressure of being the most expensive movie ever made at the time.
The erstwhile Fresh Prince hasn’t shied away from admitting he dropped the ball, opting to lead the line in a critically savaged and eight-time Razzie-winning bust instead of taking the red pill and playing the lead in a film that completely shifted the landscape of American mainstream cinema at the turn of the millennium.
If it weren’t for Wild Wild West, then Reeves wouldn’t have been in The Matrix. In a deliciously ironic twist, when he was reminded of that fact by Uproxx, he rushed to its defence. “Hey, no, Wild Wild West is good,” he said. “I liked Wild Wild West. No, I thought it was good. It’s good. The production design, Ted Levine, Kevin Kline. It was good. I enjoyed it.”
It’s one of those weird domino effects that crops up every so often, and in another world, Wild Wild West would have been made long before Smith even cracked the A-list. The feature-length adaptation of the 1960s TV show was originally announced in 1992 as a reunion between Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner, screenwriter Shane Black, and leading man Mel Gibson.
If that iteration had happened and Smith’s stratospheric rise had panned out the same way, then there was no reason why he wouldn’t have been The Matrix‘s Neo, robbing Reeves of one of his most iconic parts and successful films in the process.
