Keanu Reeves names the easiest role he ever played: “I’m not supposed to say it”
While John Wick fans will be celebrating this week that they can finally pretend to be Keanu Reeves being upset about a dead puppy in a newly announced video game, the rest of us who don’t have time to sit around smashing animated groups of pixels in the face are still waiting to hear when we’re going to get a fifth proper film in the franchise.
Yes, there was the Ana de Armas spin-off Ballerina last year, which was fine, but it wasn’t quite the same as seeing Reeves in full-on, gun-toting, suit-wearing, motorbike-riding mode, racking up an outrageously high kill count while trying to keep track of whether or not Ian McShane’s character Winston is a good guy (still on the fence).
It’s impossible to overstate just how the John Wick series came from nowhere in 2014 to become one of the most successful action franchises in movie history, now having grossed over a billion dollars across the four movies, and let’s face it Keanu Reeves was not a name on many, if anyone’s lips twelve years ago when he signed on to do the first film.
Reeves was coming off the back of ten years without a hit at the box office, with nothing really of note since 2006’s Richard Linklater-directed A Scanner Darkly, and Reeves had started to turn to directing instead, with the martial arts movie Man of Tai Chi, which remains his only time behind the camera.
And his major release of 2013, the historical fantasy 47 Ronin, had flopped badly; it was far too expensive, with a budget north of $200m, and people simply did not care enough about Reeves or understand the premise to bother going to see it, resulting in a massive loss at the box office. So hopes were not high when John Wick was released a year later.
Of course, Reeves was no stranger to action films because his major breakthrough as an actor came with 1991’s Point Break with Patrick Swayze, and he took it up another notch with Speed opposite Sandra Bullock in 1994, which was an enormous global hit and sent him to the top of Hollywood casting directors’ lists.
The result of that was Reeves signing up to two films in 1995 that couldn’t have been more different, firstly the action sci-fi Johnny Mnemonic, which was never going to be a hit because (pay attention marketing departments) people couldn’t even work out how to pronounce the title, let alone find out what it was about, and flopped with critics. And secondly, there was A Walk in the Clouds, a romantic drama about a soldier battling PTSD after returning home from WWII.
Reeves seemed fine with swapping jumping around the place, getting sweaty, and killing bad guys for looking longingly at people in military garb, and revealed at the time: “I’m not supposed to say it, but it wasn’t a challenge, really, to play the romantic man. It came easily, in fact. One reason was that I felt good about the tone of the piece, and about playing a stranger who just feels the need to care for somebody.”
Probably thanks to Reeves’ popularity at the time, the film did surprisingly well at the box office, although he picked up a Golden Raspberry nomination for ‘Worst Actor’, which, concerningly, he also earned for Johnny Mnemonic, one of seven in his career so far.
But let’s not end on a negative note, let’s remember that Reeves also got nominated for a ‘Razzie Redeemer’ award thanks to the John Wick films, nominated for those actors who did loads of rubbish stuff but then (Dumb and Dumber voice) totally redeemed themselves. Now, hopefully, he’ll get on with John Wick 5 as soon as he’s done with the other things he has coming up, of which there are plenty.
They include the new Jonah Hill movie Outcome, a fantasy warrior film adapted from a comic book series called BRZRKR, Constantine 2, and an interesting black comedy called The Entertainment System is Down about a group of passengers stuck on a long-haul flight without any films to watch. Horrible thought.
