Profile of Keanu Reeves – Meat Head, Sex Symbol, Movie Star
Notoriously reticent in interviews, it is perhaps true that Reeves will be forever associated with his first smash hit movie, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Combine the air headed dude-isms of that movie, add his own love of motorcycles (and the standard crash and DUI conviction), then mix in the slacker surfer world of Point Break, and you perhaps have an image that really will stick forever. Even early on, Reeves was nonplussed by the fame aspect and told Vanity Fair in 1995:
“I’m Mickey Mouse. They don’t know who’s inside the suit.”
In recent times though, it was the enormous worldwide success of The Matrix – and it’s rather poorer sequels and associated merchandise and video games – that saw Reeves elevated firmly onto the actors A List. He turned 40 in 2004, and at the beginning of this year he received his own star on Hollywood Walk of Fame, but what it is it about Reeves that keeps the fans coming back for more?
Named after his great, great-uncle, Keanu (pronounced “kay-ah-new”) is Hawaiian – “ke” means “the” and “anu” means “cool or coolness”, hence “the coolness” or literally interpreted as “the cool winds over the mountain” Reeves was born in Beirut, Lebanon and bought up in Canada.
Determined from a young age that acting was going to be his thing, he dropped out of school at 17 and after a handful of TV movies, won a supporting role in the hockey flick Youngblood (1986), and then packed his bags and headed for Hollywood, where he immediately turned some heads in the dark adolescent drama River’s Edge, although it was the role of totally “excellent” dude Ted Logan that made his name. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was a cultural phenomenon, and his real-life persona became in some part entwined with his on-screen counterpart from then on.
Despite his seemingly lack of interest in fame, Reeves was worried about this: “I used to have nightmares that they would put “He played Ted” on my tombstone”, and it was an image he tried to subvert afterwards, taking roles in My Own Private Idaho, Parenthood, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Much Ado About Nothing, but when he hit full Speed in 1994 alongside another actress who would go on to huge fame – Sandra Bullock – he was firmly in the stratosphere.
Even then Reeves kept shuffling the pack, appearing in small movies like Feeling Minnesota and A Walk In The Clouds, but also larger budget movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Chain Reaction, though nearly all went largely unwatched and unadmired. When he turned down the Speed sequel, many wrote him off as having had his moment in the sun.
But then came The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers’ cyber sci-fi adventure that was arguably a revolutionary moment in modern filmmaking. Although the acting had very little to do with it, Reeves was again an international movie star, and his estimated take-home from the three movies could have been close to $100,000,000. Not bad for someone who everyone thinks is a dumb surfer dude.
Since the first Matrix, he has received much critical acclaim for roles as a brutish husband in The Gift and as a serial killer in The Watcher – only proving that some people still don’t know quite what to make of him, which probably suits him just fine:
“I’m a meathead, man. You’ve got smart people, and you’ve got dumb people. I just happen to be dumb”.
Coming up soon on the big screen Reeves again tries something new, taking on the role of thug and wannabe actor Johnny Stompanato who was famously killed by Lana Turner’s young daughter, Crane, in one of the most famous Hollywood scandals ever.
