Everybody wants Keanu Reeves. But is it a case of great body, shame about the brain? ADAM SWEETING investigated while Reeves was in London with his rock group, Dogstar
NOT even Keanu Reeves’s best friends think his rock group, Dogstar, is much good, but that hasn’t hindered it. It has been the support band for David Bowie and Bon Jovi; it is touring Europe — this week in England — and it is about to release a debut CD-Rom single, a four-track effort called Quattro Formaggi.
Keanu explains that Dogstar plays “like, folk music. Folk thrash, maybe? But not quite thrash.” Yo dude! But it could copy Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. Even though Keanu only plays bass, and lurks diffidently in the shadows at the back of the stage, his presence ensures success in the one area that really counts — the group gets loads of girls in the gigs, panting for the sexiest man in Hollywood.
Reeves has been called a lot of things — “Hollywood’s grooviest airhead” and “something of a puzzle when it comes to the IQ department”. As a teenager, he was nicknamed The Wall, not only because of his ice-hockey goal-keeping technique but because that’s what he was like to talk to. There’s a suspicion that he is the classic himbo, with to- die-for bone structure, a perfectly toned physique and the brains of a polystyrene Donald Duck. But when he walks in the room, objectivity dives out of the window.
Even when Keanu has a go at Shakespeare, people only want to talk about his physical allure. Kenneth Branagh cast Reeves in his film of Much Ado About Nothing in 1993, and was fully alive to Keanu’s box- office magnetism. “You can’t quite get close to him, he is somehow unattainable,” said Branagh. “That makes him very, very attractive.” In case anybody missed the point, Branagh dressed Keanu in leather trousers. “I’d pay money to see Keanu Reeves in leather trousers, and I think a lot of people would as well,” said the actor/director honestly.
A lot of people did. Reeves has become a top earner because his appeal cuts across age and gender — as much a gay pin-up as a traditional teen idol — and he exudes a mysterious spiritual quality that gives him a New Age edge over prehistoric hunks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even when he plays action- hero roles, as in Speed, Keanu convinces you that he could only blow holes in somebody in a caring, complicated sort of way.
He has become famous for interviews in which he mixes non-sequiturs with mystical gibberish, and for being bafflingly incoherent on TV chat shows. Maybe we should be grateful for an actor who doesn’t lecture about saving the rain forest. Perhaps there’s more to Reeves than he lets on. Maybe he’s playing a long and sophisticated game.
Sheila Johnston has written a new unauthorised biography of our hero, entitled Keanu, due out later this year. She found her subject a fiendishly difficult man to pin down. “None of the interviews with him have been terribly revealing,” she explains. ” But he’s a really interesting guy because he’s got a huge constituency of fans.”
Keanu’s dazed demeanour as an interviewee might have been designed to communicate the sense of a beautiful boy who just can’t cope. But you can’t help feeling that you don’t become one of the biggest box-office draws by accident. Keanu is determined to make himself a better and more versatile actor. “I talked to quite a few directors who’d worked with him, and they said he’s a real perfectionist,” Johnston adds.
Keanu isn’t the first actor to want to be taken, uh, seriously. He was in Romeo and Juliet in Toronto in the mid-Eighties and in 1989 he appeared in The Tempest in Lenox, Massachusetts. More widely reviewed was his season as Hamlet in Winnipeg last year: as The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland put it, “He was great when he was a movie star, and ropey when he was just plain acting.”
But Keanu’s qualities are good enough for some highly regarded movie auteurs. Francis Ford Coppola cast him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Bernardo Bertolucci was convinced that nobody else would do for his 1993 film, Little Buddha. The story’s child- like wonderment and laid-back values were pure Keanu. (His name does mean “cool breeze over the mountains” in Hawaiian.)
“Keanu is exotic,” says British Film Institute chairman Jeremy Thomas, who produced Little Buddha. “But I can’t tell you too much about him, except that I enjoyed working with him.”
Thomas does detect purpose and self-determination in Reeves’s career. “I think he’s a maturing actor, and he’s going to do some beautiful work in the future. He chose not to make Speed II, which I think was brave and right. It shows who he is, strongly. And he likes motorcycles, which is okay with me.”
Like Keanu, he has a British-built Norton motorbike (Keanu has two). Let’s hope Thomas doesn’t fall off as often as Reeves parts company with his, with near-fatal results. He carries scars all over his body from crashes, most noticeably the prominent one which runs from the lower part of his chest down to his navel, the legacy of an accident so gruesome that Keanu had to have his spleen removed.
You’d think prudence, and insurance premiums, might have persuaded him to switch to something four- wheeled, but semioticians might explain his love. Spinning boldly along the open road, Keanu is able to express his questing free spirit, and he must be familiar with that classic text, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And riding big, powerful motorbikes is a macho boy’s thing, giving Keanu’s forays into the action-adventure genre some real- life ballast.
Cod psychologists would have us believe that Keanu’s restless, risky approach to his career stems from a peripatetic upbringing, and the painful legacy of his drug-addict father, Samuel, who’s currently serving a 10-year jail sentence for possession of cocaine and heroin. Keanu was born in Beirut in 1964, and inherited his looks from the Chinese- Hawaiian Samuel and his British-born wife, Patricia. The family soon moved to Australia, but after bitter rows about drug-taking, Samuel walked out. Patricia later moved to New York, and then took her family to Toronto when Keanu was seven.
Reeves’s film career looks haphazard but the roles he has chosen often reflect some aspect of himself. He’s acutely conscious of the danger of Hollywood stereotyping. “There’s no way I can control how someone’s going to interpret what I do,” he said, around the time of Point Break. “The only thing I can do is control what I involve myself in.”
There was some genuine essence of Keanu in his performance as the dimwitted Valley boy Ted Logan in Bill and Ted’s Excellent
Adventure. The physical Keanu who loves motorbikes and ice-hockey surfaces in Speed. In Parenthood, he was entirely believeable (and funny) as the slacker squiring Martha Plimpton.
He wasn’t quite so believeable in Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons, but the idea of him as an innocent, ardent young lover probably seemed like a good idea at the time. And then there was his Scott Favor in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Reeves’s character was a rich kid, slumming it in the rent boy underworld, buddying up with River Phoenix. The theme of drifting youth won it cult status, and the homoerotic bond between Reeves and Phoenix did wonders for Keanu’s gender-crossing appeal.
The Is Keanu Gay? question became a major preoccupation among Keanu-watchers last
year, when the bizarre rumour that Reeves had “married” record industry mogul David Geffen flashed around the globe.
The origin of this was probably a case of mistaken identity, but Keanu’s diffuse response to questions about his sexuality helped keep the story alive. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay, so to deny is to make a judgment,” Keanu told Vanity Fair, with impeccable political correctness. His comment to the same interviewer that he’d never had a male sexual experience didn’t make it into print.
For the future, it looks as if he plans to strike a balance between big mainstream pictures like the forthcoming Chain Reaction, and low-budget, left- field work. Despite his fondness for motorcycles, and rumours that he has flirted with hard drugs, you can’t imagine him ending up prematurely dead and unfulfilled, like his friend Phoenix. According to one American writer, “under his much-publicised ditzy vagueness is a very secure actor who knows what he wants”. Not that he’d ever admit it.
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