Alex Pappademas - Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon

Copyright 2022 Alex Pappademas

Illustrations copyright 2022 Eoin Coveney

Cover 2022 Abrams

Published in 2022 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946831

ISBN: 978-1-4197-5226-1

eISBN: 978-1-64700-199-5

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There is four helicopter running after person and destroy his car. The truth, too, is fourfold:

1) life sucks;
2) for good reason;
3) you can sit under a tree;
4) the movie never ends, it goes on and on

MICHAEL ROBBINS, DOWNWARD-FACING DOG

I need this poor boy! This poor boy is the only one who knows the frequencies!

MORGAN FREEMAN AS DR. PAUL SHANNON IN CHAIN REACTION, 1996

The fake Keanu wore a surgical mask and a squint. The fake Keanu was pretty obviously not the real Keanu, but until this was confirmed it was exciting to live in a reality where the alternative could be true.

It was the last weekend of May 2020, five days after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and millions of people across the country and around the world had taken to the streets, despite a global pandemic, to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and the victims of police violence.

Some of them were famous. John Boyega and a maskless Madonna appeared at protests in London. Ariana Grande and Fiona Apple marched in Los Angeles. In Santa Monica, Timothe Chalamet carried a sign with Kalief Browders name scrawled on it, and Halsey was struck by a rubber bullet.

And for a short while, between 2:54 P.M. and 4:47 P.M. Eastern time on May 30, many people on social media became convinced that the participants in a car-caravan protest in Baltimore had included Keanu Charles Reeves, a fifty-five-year-old bass player, art book publisher, motorcycle-accident survivor and non-college-graduate from Los Angeles who makes his living as an actor.

The tweet that started it all read My boy protesting in Baltimore today, with a picture of a masked man with spiky dark hair, standing up through his sunroof, holding a NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE sign.

It wasnt Keanu. It was so not Keanu. In May 2020, Keanu had long hair and a full beard, and he still had both in photos taken later that summer. This was some guy with a vaguely Keanuesque widows peak and a haircut Keanu hadnt had since Constantine. The image quickly accumulated tens of thousands of likes and retweets anyway, with enthusiastic captions like KEANU REEVES IS PROTESTING IN BALTIMORE!!!!!! LETS GOOOOOOOOO and now yall got John Wick fed up.

In his long public life, Keanu has taken few political positions, not even in a Rock the Vote kind of way. But that springs protests felt like a moment of extraordinary possibility, a statement of collective belief that the world could be changed, the unprecedented made real. Nothing was unimaginable, not even Keanu choosing that moment to stand up for a cause by joining a car caravan in Baltimore, a city where he does not live.

Finally, the person whod posted the original tweet added a clarification.

Yall, this is MY BOY, like my SON. He lives in Baltimore. Its not Keanu. Sorry to disappoint you!

This story tells us something about the worlds relationship to Keanu. A bubble of Keanoid mystery still surrounds him even after thirty-five years of public hyperscrutiny. That mystery makes him into a projection screen for our ideas. What we see is not Keanu but Keanu as constructed by our imaginations.

We think of Keanu as being better than us, more Zen, more ethical, more brave. We assume Keanu shares our political affinities. (Further down in the replies, the original poster of the car-protest Keanu image mused, I think Keanu owes me something for unintentionally making everyone think hes Antifa lol.) We picture him out there doing the right thing, no matter what he might actually be doing. We conceive of a whole existence for Keanu that may have little to do with who he really is.

I cannot imagine his inner life at all, my friend Molly once said of him, which is why he is Gods perfect actor.

This is not a book about the real Keanu Reeves, but I have met the real Keanu Reeves. I interviewed him for two hours and then met him again the next day and interviewed him for another two hours, and later I wrote a cover story for GQ magazine about what that experience was like.

It rained in my bedroom the day I met him for the first time. That part wasnt in the story.

I live with my family in a rented house that is slowly sliding down a hill on the east side of Los Angeles. The upstairs part of the house is at street level; the master bedroom is downstairs, on the garden level. The night before my first meeting with Keanu Reeves, it rained, and wet leaves blocked a drain outside the laundry-room door. By morning the water outside had risen above the doors bottom edge and a flood began to seep into the laundry room. The laundry room is directly above the master bedroom.

We woke up to rainwater dripping from the seams in the ceiling, the heating vents, the light. The paint on the ceiling buckled and bubbled. There were at least four discrete leaks pinging into buckets and bowls in our room when I left the house to go meet Keanu Reeves.

The fluid dynamics of this event seem pretty straightforward to me as I type this, but later that day I found myself sitting on a damp couch outside the Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood, trying and failing to explain the flood to Keanu Reeves, whom Id known at that point for five minutes.

I showed up to the Chateau nervously early and interrupted Keanu trying to smoke a quick private cigarette in the otherwise unpopulated waiting area by the valet station at the top of the driveway. So we sat for a minute. He brought up the weather and I told him about the rain in my house.

The story seemed to make him confused and a little frustrated. He seemed puzzled by how the street-level floor and the garden-level floor could both in their own way be the first floor but also the second floor, and he also seemed a little unsure as to why Id started telling him this story in the first place, which was a feeling we shared.