When Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter rehearsed in Stevie Nicks’ house
The opening moments of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure feature Keanu Reeves’ Ted and Alex Winter’s Bill attempting to shoot a “triumphant video” to promote their band, the Wyld Stallyns. As their amps blow up and billows of smoke force them out of the garage they’re filming in, the music video seems more tragic than triumphant.
Perhaps a choreographed dance routine might have saved it, or, at least, that’s what the writers initially thought. According to Alex Winter, the original script for the film included a “surreal rock number” featuring himself and Reeves rocking out at a bus stop. “And it turned into a whole dance routine,” he explained in Rolling Stone.
“Then it ends up with us kind of getting into a skirmish with the school jocks and you meet our characters that way. All of that stuff was shot and none of it made it into the film,” he continued. It’s not hard to understand why the scene didn’t quite make it into the final cut, but the idea of Reeves and Winter breaking out into a choreographed dance while waiting for the bus isn’t even the most bizarre part of the story.
The two leads practised the number for weeks during the shoot in Arizona, and one of their rehearsal locations was at a house owned by Stevie Nicks. With a dance routine choreographed by either Kenny Ortega or “someone like Kenny Ortega, like some really big, Eighties music-video rock/hip-hop/dance choreographer of some renown,” Reeves and Winter found themselves in the Fleetwood Mac frontwoman’s home dance studio.
“I started out dancing, but by no means at that time was I any kind of a dancer, and they looked at me and Keanu like, ‘Oh, God. What are we gonna do with you guys?’” Reeves recalled, “So we rehearsed this number for weeks in, of all places, Stevie Nicks’ house in Phoenix. Because for some reason, Stevie Nicks had a full ballet studio in her desert ranch house, with a full ballet barre and mirrors and wood floors, literally the whole thing.”
Winter, Reeves, and the Ortega-esque choreographer spent “day after day, pounding out this routine, like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.” Though Winter recalls getting into character and giving it “full gusto”, the actor was hesitant about how the scene might fit into the final cut, and rightfully so. “I remember wondering how the hell that scene would work, and I guess, ultimately, it didn’t,” he laughed.
As the scene never made the final cut, we can only hope that one day, some footage of Reeves and Winter dancing around the ‘Dreams‘ singer’s home ballet studio emerges. For now, revisit the actual opening moments of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure below.
