Resurrection Man

What’s in a name?

There are many ways to measure the waxing and waning of a Hollywood star’s career. There are the box-office numbers: those brutal indices of their performance as a studio investment. There are the awards, won, nominated for, or missed out on entirely. There are the acres (or inches) of tabloid coverage, social media rankings, the going rate for a paparazzi snap. 

But when it comes to Keanu Reeves there is another measure of his popularity, and it comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Social Security.

Among the reams of statistics the department pumps out annually to delighted demography nerds is a list of the relative popularity of the top 1,000 US baby names over time. Until 1994 the moniker ‘Keanu’ had not troubled the chart at all, but that year, the same one that Reeves undeniably attained the rank of ‘movie star’ with his performance as harassed cop Jack Traven in Speed, it roared in at number 755, ascending to the rank of 538 the following year. 

But the success wasn’t to last. By the early 2000’s (The Matrix Reloaded/Constantine) the number of new parents welcoming a little Keanu had slipped to number 678 and it was to continue its decline throughout the aughts (A Scanner Darkly/The Day The Earth Stood Still/47 Ronin), bumping around the very bottom of the chart, somewhere in the 970s, from 2005 to 2016.

And then something unexpected happened. In 2014 Reeves donned the mantle of John Wick, and the stats started rising. Keanu ranked 893rd most popular male baby name in 2017 (John Wick: Chapter 2). By 2019 (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) it was at 630.

And then, in 2021, 520 new Keanus were welcomed into the world, the highest number ever, making it the 514th most popular boys’ name in the U.S.

All of which is a roundabout (but statistically totally bodacious) way of saying: you can’t argue with the numbers. A thousand and forty pattering baby feet prove Keanu Reeves is back. And he’s a bigger star than ever.

 

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It might seem hard to believe these days, when a simple picture of him looking a bit glum on a park bench can spark a global wave of digital distress, but when he started out Keanu Reeves was a bit of a joke: a shaggy-haired slacker-wannabe with a weird name and occasional snarked-about personal hygiene issues. In early interviews he demonstrated a goofy demeanour, a tortured relationship with the English language and a penchant for randomness that positively demands a publicist's panicked intervention. (On being asked about his nascent stardom he once announced “I feel like a young pubic hair – you know, I keep getting checked out and played with sometimes.”)

He’d been born in Beirut, the son of a costume designer and a barely present dad who vanished completely after a couple of years, only to reappear on drug charges in the 2000s. (I feel I’ve got some of my father’s blood in me,” Reeves later told Rolling Stone. “And I’m not happy about it.”) The family globe-hopped for a while, living in Sydney and New York before winding up in Toronto where young Keanu discovered acting at high school. Subsequently there were commercials, plays, and the occasional TV movie, but in the Summer of 1985 he decamped for Hollywood. “I was tired of playing the best friend, thug number one, the tall guy,” he told US Magazine in 1988. “So I got in my dumpy 1969 Volvo and drove here with $3,000. I stayed at my stepfather’s and proceeded to go into the darkness that is L.A.”

Though he didn’t know it he was entering the industry at a febrile time. The synthetic, toothsome charms of the Brat Pack were on their way out to be replaced by a generation of young actors who modelled themselves after the method-inflected titans of the 1970s – the De Niros and Pacinos – and for whom the newly emerging indie movie scene would, for a while, be home. Though Reeves can be glimpsed next to Rob Lowe in glossy hockey-flick Youngblood in 1986, it was the same year’s River’s Edge – an underseen, bleak, micro-budget ensemble piece about a group of nihilist teens who murder a friend – that seems to speak to how Reeves then saw himself as an actor.  “A lot of people I’ve been working with have a sense of darkness and seriousness about their point-of-view of acting,” he said at the time. “There are a lot of heavy actors who are going to come out and surprise people.”

And so he made Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). Dark and serious it may not have been, but it showcased his goofy appeal. It was a sunny romp that, oddly, would have an unimaginably extended afterlife. But it was Point Break (1991) two years later that was the true harbinger of the stardom to come. “The character’s a kind of adrenaline junkie, and there’s this other adrenaline junkie and they push each other into jumping out of aeroplanes, shooting guns, shit like that,” was Reeve’s enthusiastic summation of the movie’s plot. It’s pretty much on the money. Kathryn Bigelow’s movie was a sunset-burnished hymn to testosterone, one in which Reeves suddenly emerged, butterfly-like, from the slackerdom of Bill & Ted and River’s Edge onto the edges of legit movie stardom. Bigelow’s camera swoons over Reeves’ Johnny Utah (who, incidentally, delivers what might be the best foot-chase in movie history). It’s pure, refined, grade-A octane. But, typically, Reeves remained, career-wise, Janus-faced, delivering that same year, Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, an achingly sad indie tale of desperate hustlers and doomed love in which he almost managed to be visible next to the incandescent performance of his co-star, and by then close friend, River Phoenix. 

But after the success of Point Break, and in a pattern that would repeat itself, he found himself in search of a hit. Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) was, at the time, a high-profile bust – though latterly its reputation has rightly improved. “I got killed on Dracula,” Reeves later said. “I got slaughtered. The other actors’ performances were so operatic, and I didn’t hold up my side of the bargain. I was too introverted, too safe. I didn’t act very well, I’ll leave it at that.” He’s too hard on himself. His slightly off-kilter performance, and admittedly uncertain Brit accent, is of a piece with Coppola’s phantasmagorical take on the subject matter. Frankly, he’s no weirder than anything else in it. 

Reeves was, for a while, managing to play both sides: hip indie actor with impeccable artistic credentials on the one hand, rising young movie star with an increasingly insistent, curious teenage fan base on the other. Rumours about his sexual orientation, in the 1990s pretty much a badge of honour for any half-successful male actor, swirled and were, occasionally clumsily, put to bed. His career was at a crossroads, so it’s ironic that the movie that would finally divert him to megastardom would take place, for the most part, on the tarmac. At about 50 mph.

“I did a pretty good job on Speed, and it’s there on the screen, but I don’t feel like it’s my film,” Reeves said of the movie that finally made him a box-office player, and which still has a strong claim on the title Greatest Action Movie Ever Made. “I mean it’s great the be in such a successful film, but I don’t know how much of that success is down to me.”

He’s wrong about that. Speed certainly has the kind of elevator pitch that’ll get you a development deal before you reach the third floor – there’s a bomb on a bus! It can’t slow down! – but that it’s something beyond just the standard action hokum, however expertly wrought, is wholly down to Reeves. In an era when action icons were still divided into the sweatily steroidal (Arnie/Sly) or the relentlessly wise-crackling (Mel/Bruce) Reeves, typically, charted a third way. His Jack Traven – brave, vulnerable and sexy as all hell – drew on a much older movie archetype. He was the ordinary guy doing his best:  Alan Ladd in Shane or Gary Cooper in High Noon, buffed up, buzz-cutted and squeezed into a white tee. It was, is, an utterly irresistible performance. 

Reeves, typically quixotically, turned down the opportunity to star in its sequel, opting instead to tour with his universally-acknowledged-to-be-average band Dogstar. This was a decision that had consequences. The studio sent him to movie jail, refusing to do business with him for a decade. The upside? He wasn’t in Speed 2.

Today The Matrix (1999), the movie that would, for a brief while cement Reeves as the coolest cat in the movie firmament, looks like a slam-dunk. At the time it was a risky proposition that pretty much no one apart from the Wachowskis fully understood. “I’m tired, I just want to do Chekov,” Reeves had told the directing siblings when presented with the screenplay, a reality-bending piece that seemed to feature impossible visuals, time-twisting moments in which the camera wove among the frozen characters, and balletic fight sequences which appeared to take place in a world where the rules of physics were just suggestions. “You can do Chekov when you’re older,” was their reply. The movie arrived like a bombshell at the turn of the millennium. Action movies, it seemed, could never really be the same again. And Reeves, with his air of mystery, of tantalising not-quite-thereness, perfect for a movie about the increasingly unreliable nature of reality, became the avatar of this new breed of action-hero.

 

 

And then, almost inexplicably, there were the extended fallow years. It seems impossible now, with that troika of hits behind him – Point Break, Speed, The Matrix – that by the aughts Reeves’ career was sliding. Things had started to go kerflooey with the Matrix sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions; hastily written, shot back-to-back and both released in 2003, they seemed to be driven by the impatient commercial instincts of producer Joel Silver rather than the careful, intellectual, artistic ones of The Wachowskis. Constantine (2005), based on the DC comics Hellblazer story, had been a labour of love, both for Reeves and Australian commercials director Francis Lawrence, but, despite a respectable box office, it failed to catch the public’s imagination. A Scanner Darkly (2006) is probably the nearest thing to a faithful Philip K. Dick adaptation, and perhaps that’s why its appeal seemed limited to sci-fi superfans. 

Big studio projects similarly failed to connect: a second outing with Sandra Bullock, this time for out-and-out romance in The Lake House in 2006 fizzled and The Day The Earth Stood Still in 2008 was DOA. 47 Ronin (2013) was a gleefully-reported industry debacle that seemed finally to put the tin lid on Reeves’ career as an A-lister. 

And then came John Wick (2014). It looked like a Hail Mary – a low-budget Revenge-O-Matic originally written for an elderly Hollywood statesman – Clint Eastwood was once in the frame – zero budget to speak of and to be directed by a former stuntman. Not promising. But Reeves transformed it into a powerhouse franchise, for the studios a miraculous original IP with apparently limitless sequel potential. “One of the things that drew me to Wick was his sense of honour and desire to lead a better life,” he said. “He’s driven by a firm set of principles and he’s not someone who you want to mess around with after he’s lost his wife and simply wants to be left alone. But once he’s set in motion, he’s going to be a man who is very hard to stop.” With a fifth entry in the series already on the horizon, he seems to be right.

In John Wick, as in almost everything else, Reeves’ magnetic appeal has always been as difficult to pin down; it’s as mercurial and mysterious as the man himself. Kenneth Branagh might have come closest to nailing it when he remarked of casting him in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing: “He has this aloof quality. He’s a very sexy, erotic, physical being. He can be very gentle and then very fierce, and very funny. And yet . . .  there’s something in his eyes that says, no I won't be committing here. He’s already on the bus, heading somewhere else. There’s something tremendously attractive about the combination of the utterly desirable and the definitely unattainable.”

Whatever his weird alchemy, nearly thirty years after Speed, a quarter century since The Matrix, and with Reeves well into middle age (he’s 58) it’s riding as high as it ever has. There’s a Constantine sequel in the works, he delighted gamers with his role as anti-hero Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077 and there are persistent rumours of a Marvel hookup. “We talk to him for almost every film we make,” spandex-wrangler Kevin Feige said in 2019. “We very much want to figure out the right way to do it.” 

“I think I’ve done some good work in some good films,” Reeves once said. “But I think I’m an acquired taste. Either you dig me or you don’t.”

We dig, Keanu. And if we ever didn’t dig, we dig now. Some of us dig enough to name our kids after you.