The movie Keanu Reeves warned Halle Berry about: “I broke three ribs at one point”
Watching a movie is pretty easy work. You might be nestled into the couch, bowl of popcorn within reaching distance. You might be sitting back at the cinema, feet curled up, feeling slightly guilty after splashing half of your paycheck on those delectable blue slushies.
Actually making a movie is much harder. Preparing for a role might have some physical demands, but usually, it is the psychological toll which takes the greatest effect on an actor. Learning lines can be hard work, too. But for Keanu Reeves, the most effort he’d ever put into a project was the physical labour.
Exercising can be draining for everyone of us. I, for one, jog drearily and half-heartedly around sad-looking London parks, feeling sorry for myself, stopping every five minutes to change a song. For John Wick, Reeves didn’t have that luxury.
John Wick quickly became one of Reeves’ many blockbuster franchises. The 2014 hit was a huge moment for Reeves and director Chad Stahelski. Every few years a new instalment has arrived and only added more fuel to the fiery series. The training for Reeves, who played a retired hitman pulled back into the throngs of a dangerous criminal underworld, was endless.
In one scene in the first instalment, Wick breaks into a bathhouse and nightclub. He defeats his enemies in a chaotic, grandiose, and gruesome scene, which includes water choreography, hundreds of extras, death by balcony—you name it. Reeves pulled it all off on his own.
By the time the third film rolled around, and actor Halle Berry was lined up for a starring role, Reeves knew the right thing to do was to warn her about the regime coming her way. “Keanu told me, when I first started, ‘You’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked, but it’s going to be the most rewarding at the end of the day, I promise you,’” Berry once shared. “And he was absolutely right.”
Turns out, Reeves was right to give Berry the warning. She has since detailed the excruciating training regimen, noting that it was a step up from her training for Catwoman, X-Men, and Bond. “This was on another level,” she admitted. “I trained for about six months, five days a week. It was gun training, jiu-jitsu, aikido, all different kinds of martial arts. I broke three ribs at one point.”
Berry trained like an MMA fighter. She shadowboxed, wore a sauna suit, and skipped rope, trained by Peter Lee Thomas, who had previously studied martial arts. At one point during training, Thomas would put her through an “animal flow,” which incorporated Capoeira moves, a form of Brazilian martial arts, and dynamic stretching. Mind you, this was only during the warm-up.
Luckily for Berry, this type of thing is what drew her into the franchise in the first place. In a world where superhero movies increasingly use CGI to manipulate their leading characters into weird and wonderful shapes, she loved watching a human body push itself to its very limits. A very different picture to the cinema-goer, popcorn kernels down their front like extra buttons on a jacket.
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