Trading a classic for a flop: the roles Val Kilmer and Keanu Reeves swapped
Actors are constantly ships passing in the night, regularly circling the same roles and creating domino effects when the cards ultimately end up toppling in the other direction, although there’s no debate over who got the better end of the deal when Val Kilmer and Keanu Reeves traded places.
They were both in-demand stars in the mid-1990s – and the latter remains one to this day – which inevitably had them on many of the same shortlists at around the same time. The Matrix is just one of several projects on which their names were bandied about in the same conversation, but Kilmer ended up lucking out and inadvertently saddling Reeves with a major box office bomb.
When the opportunity arose to embody Chris Shiherlis in Michael Mann’s classic crime thriller Heat, Reeves was one of the first names under consideration. He was hotter than ever coming off the back of blockbuster hit Speed, but he declined the opportunity in favour of treading the boards in his native Canada to perform Shakespeare instead.
That worked hugely in Kilmer’s favour, to say the least, with the movie going down as one of the best of his entire career and a huge missed opportunity for his counterpart. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine the stoic, blank-faced, and boyish Reeves being the perfect fit for the character, so it would be fair to say everything worked out for the best.
Prior to his banner 1995 that saw him appear in Heat and Batman Forever within months of each other, Kilmer was attached to play the title role in the adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk short story Johnny Mnemonic. The film had been in development since the 1980s, but it was nearing the starting line before the initial choice of leading man jumped ship.
Gibson would tell Patrick A. Smith that once the replacement was lined up, signed on, and ready to shoot, “He really got Johnny from day one.” Not only that, but he went on record saying, “Keanu is fantastic,” a feeling that wasn’t reciprocated either by critics or the very small percentage of cinemagoing patrons who actually went out of their way and bothered catching Johnny Mnemonic on the big screen.
Resoundingly trashed, Gibson’s comments became increasingly ironic when the consensus began forming that Reeves was painfully miscast, not that the film remained much of a cultural concern for very long when it fell off a commercial abyss and was quickly tossed onto the cinematic scrapheap and forgotten.
And to think, had things turned out the way they were originally intended, it would have been Kilmer headlining the disastrous Johnny Mnemonic while Reeves got the chance to share a cast with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat.
