Keanu Reeves E-Book

Brian J Robb

• Herausgeber: Plexus Publishing Ltd.
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Keanu Reeves' combination of authority, forthrightness, and sexy good looks has made him one of the most popular and bankable modern stars. In this revised and updated biography, Brian J. Robb explores Reeves on- and offscreen, including his rock 'n roll career with the band Dog Star, and the twin tragedies that took the lives of his unborn daughter and his former partner Jennifer Syme. This new edition contains 130 photographs and a 48-page coverage of The Matrix and its sequel including location reports, plot previews, and a glimpse of the trilogy's breathtaking climax.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

To my brother, Steven.

Thanks to BFI Information and Library Services and Mike Wingate at C&A Video in Edinburgh. Other organisations and individuals who provided additional assistance include: The Directors Guild of America; American Film Institute; British Film Institute; National Film Theatre; all at Plexus and everyone at the various film production, distributors and publicists offices.

I would like to thank the following magazines and newspapers for their coverage of Keanu Reeves over the years: Film Review; The List; Vox; GQ; Sky Magazine; Esquire; Attitude; Entertainment Weekly; Sight and Sound; Empire; Premiere (US, UK and French editions); U.S. Magazine; Vanity Fair; Here!; People Weekly; Daily Mirror; The Sun; News of the World; Daily Star; Village Voice; Film Threat; Fangoria;

Cinefantastique; Starlog; Interview; Vogue; America Film; Time Out; What’s On In London; The Face; Rolling Stone; Hello!; Monthly Film Bulletin; Time; Movieline; Variety; New Yorker; TV Guide; Film Monthly; Scotland on Sunday; The Guardian; The Daily Record; The Mail on Sunday; The Daily Mail; The Sunday Telegraph; The Scotsman; The Herald; Today; The Sunday Times; The Independent; The Evening Standard; The Daily Telegraph; Edinburgh Evening News; The Sunday Express; Spectator; Today; The New York Times; The Observer and The Daily Express.

Grateful thanks to the following libraries and film companies for supplying photographs:

Alpha; All Action; All Action/PAT/Arnal/Garcia; Philip Ramey/All Action; All Action/Stills/Foto Blitz; Jean Cummings/All Action; All Action/Feature Flash; All Action/Stills/I.P.A; British Film Institute; Corbis/Everett Collection; Range/Everett Pictures Limited; Ronald Grant; Columbia TriStar Films (UK); Castle Premier Releasing; Columbia Pictures Inc; Entertainment Films; Takashi Seida/Twentieth Century Fox; Richard Foreman/Twentieth Century Fox; Murray

Close/Twentieth Century Fox; Steve Granitz/Retna; Armando Gallo/Retna; Martin Goodacre/Retna; Bill Davila/Retna; Brad Fierce/ La Moine/Katz Pictures Limited; Steven Klein/ Katz Pictures Limited/Outline; Brad Fierce/La Moine/Katz Pictures Limited; Alberto Tolot/Katz Pictures Limited; Brad Fierce/La Moine/Katz Pictures Limited; Scope Features/Shooting Star; Alan Markfield/Scope

Features/Shooting Star; Stephen Hamels/Scope Features/Shooting Star; Takashi Seida/TriStar Pictures, Inc; People in Pictures; MCP/Time Out.

Film stills courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox; Metor-Goldwyn-Mayer; United Artists; Disney; Lorimar Motion Pictures; CBS Entertainment Productions; Hemdale Film Corporation; New Lines; Paramount Pictures; Kings Road; Warner Brothers; American Playhouse; Universal Pictures; Chesnut Hill/TriStar; Odyssey/Polar Entertainment Corporation; Largo Entertainment; New Line Cinema; Columbia Pictures; Interscope Communications; American Zoetrope; Osiris Films; Pandora; BBC; Renaissance Films; Samuel Goldwyn Company; Fourth Vision; CiBy 2000; Cinevision; Alliance Communications; TriStar; Zucker Brothers Production; Fine Line; Jersey Films; Chicago Pacific Entertainment; Bates Entertainment; Kushner Locke Co; Tapestry Films; KI; 7 Venture; New Regency; 3 Arts; Alphaville Films; Lakeshore Entertainment; Paramount Classics; Fireworks Productions; Nides McCormick Productions;Tollin/Robbins Productions; United International Pictures; Village Roadshow Productions; NPV Entertainment; Silver Pictures; Sony Pictures Entertainment; Donner Productions.

Contents

Introduction

1. Cool Breeze

2. Teen on the Edge

3. Prince of Hollywood

4. Keanu’s Excellent Adventure

5. Breaking Point

6. Bard and Buddha

7. Speeding to Success

8. Head in the Clouds

9. Chain Reaction

10. The One

11. Love and Loss

12 Keanu Reloaded

Filmography

Introduction

THEMATRIX trilogy saved Keanu Reeves. The original 1999 futuristic adventure film, and its sequels, revived his career and provided an escape when his private life was overwhelmed by tragedy. It’s not much of an exaggeration to argue that while Reeves, in the role of Neo, saved the world from malevolent artificial intelligence, the making of the Matrix movies saved the actor himself.

From his days as a teen idol, through success with his first bonafide blockbuster, Speed, Keanu had never been taken seriously in Hollywood. Caricatured as an on and off-screen airhead, who only scored a fluke hit movie every five years or so, he was an easy target. After the astonishing success of Speed, however, his critics bided their time, waiting to see what he’d do next. Avoiding Speed 2 (later seen as a wise career move), Reeves dabbled in sci fi (Johnny Mnemonic), action (Chain Reaction), romance (A Walk in the Clouds) and horror (Devil’s Advocate). All to no avail . . .

It was The Matrix, which combined sci fi action with romance and horror all in one high-tech package, that gave him the hit he badly needed by the end of the 1990s. More than that, The Matrix was not just a one-off but a franchise to which Reeves was only too happy to hitch his wagon. Utimately, it would secure his future in Hollywood while affording him the right to continue with his occasional art-movie dalliances.

Prior to Speed and The Matrix, Keanu was perceived as a pin-up who had made the teen movie his own, with the controversial drama River’s Edge and the goofy time-travel comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But he was always more ambitious than the intellectually-challenged characters portrayed in these films, even though he willingly projected their personae in interviews and TV appearances. In fact, he would prove versatile enough to diversify into literary costume drama – Dangerous Liaisons, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Much Ado About Nothing – and independent art movies that were well off the Hollywood radar, including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Little Buddha, Feeling Minnesota and The Last Time I Committed Suicide.

Despite his awareness of the need to hit the right numbers at the box office, Reeves’ real ambition lay in films that challenged him as an actor. He has carved out a unique niche for a major Hollywood star, never afraid to experiment in roles such as the gay hustler in My Own Private Idaho, or the young lover in ‘magic realist’ soap-opera Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Amid the action and adventure of The Matrix, Keanu’s Neo found time to romance Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss).

Keanu and River Phoenix took risks with their images and audiences in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.

Contrary to the popular perception of him, Keanu takes the process of acting extremely seriously. Of the generation of male Hollywood stars now entering their late thirties – including Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Christian Slater – he is the only one to have risked tackling Shakespeare both on stage and on film: in the daunting title role of Hamlet, in Winnipeg, January 1995, and as the villainous Don John in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Much Ado About Nothing.

But such depths don’t square with the popular image. The Bill and Ted airhead character, which he was only too happy to play up to early in his career, stuck with him for years. Consequently, what his critics often saw as a questionable choices of roles was just Reeves taking the opportunity to stretch himself beyond what mainstream Hollywood could offer, and to lay Bill and Ted to rest.

All the many facets of Keanu Reeves would roll into one for The Matrix: the comic character of his teen movies; the action hero of Point Break and Speed; the serious thespian of his indie films. In the role of hacker Thomas A. Anderson – aka Neo, the possible saviour of humanity – in The Matrix, he drew on all his previous roles in the service of a larger vision, the sci-fi future world conjured up by the Wachowski Brothers.

All his experience of working in low budget independent films, with novice directors, had paid off. As had his work with such acclaimed filmmakers as Gus Van Sant, Bernardo Bertolucci, Stephen Frears and Francis Ford Coppola – all of whom actively sought out Keanu Reeves.

Once the critical whipping boy of young Hollywood, Reeves has risen above it to produce an intriguing body of work. Ironically perhaps, while some have criticised his acting as hopelessly wooden, he has risen to the top of the Hollywood tree – claiming $20 million for each mainstream movie he signs up for.

As a new type of action hero, Keanu made a huge impact in Jan De Bont’s thriller Speed.

Keanu has also revealed himself to be a much smarter operator than he cares to reveal, taking advantage of every opportunity and building a strong career on the back of supposedly limited abilities. ‘I’m still learning, dude,’ he once told an interviewer, and it’s an education he has bravely undergone in public: getting better in each film, and wiser in his choice of material. His urge to try something new has earned him the right to fail now and again – but without the failure of Johnny Mnemonic, perhaps he wouldn’t have been confident enough to tackle the similarly-themed The Matrix.

Knowing how image can often outweigh talent, Reeves has wisely played to his strengths. He has appeared as enigmatic off-screen as on, a loner who seemed to have no private life, onto whom audiences could project their own desires. His image and his sex appeal have proven infinitely adaptable to the needs of everyone from screaming teenage girls to his strong, loyal gay fan base.

Although flattered by the attention, however, Keanu himself cannot relate to the fuss that surrounds his public profile. Almost paranoid in the secrecy that surrounds his private life, rumours have linked him over the years with Pamela Anderson, Sharon Stone, Sofia Coppola and Amanda De Cadenet. But Keanu has never enjoyed the traditional high-profile movie star romance, and this lack of visible heterosexual activity has led to speculation about his sexuality. A homoerotic early theatre role, in Wolfboy, and his upfront performance as a hustler in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, did nothing to dampen speculation about his preferences.

This sexual ambiguity has undoubtedly been part of the Keanu Reeves appeal. Married to his exotic name and almost feminine good looks, it has earned him a strong female and gay following. The actor himself recognises how his image redefines male movie-star sexuality: ‘I’ve always played the male equivalent of the female ingenue. I’ve always played innocents.’

But even Keanu couldn’t conceal a pregnant girlfriend. In mid-1999, his ‘secret’ lover Jennifer Syme was announced to be carrying his daughter. As much as it was a shock to his fans, it seems to have been almost as much of a surprise to Reeves – one to which he rapidly had to adapt. The cruel irony is that, having made an accommodation with imminent fatherhood, it was all to end in tragedy.

Cruel fate, and its repercussions on his family life, have been at the heart of many of Keanu’s problems. Having survived several nearfatal motorbike accidents, when he was held by LA police in 1993 on a drunk-driving charge, Reeves’ own mugshot reminded the actor of his absent, convicted drug-dealer father, Samuel.

To a large extent, his life, his professional drive, and his relationship difficulties have all been defined by the absence of the father he hasn’t seen since age thirteen. But, if this early trauma has provided both the drive behind the excellent adventures of Keanu’s Hollywood career and his personal life, it’s also contributed to his fatal hesitancy in committing to long-term relationships, and his fears that lovers, advisors, even audiences, will abandon him.

Now, as he approaches the age of 40, Keanu Reeves has reached a turning point. He faces serious choices about what kind of career he wants at the end of his second decade in Hollywood, and new personal challenges in the wake of the loss of his own small family. Like his character in The Matrix, Reeves faces a defining decision. But, rather than whether to take the red pill or the blue pill, it’s a question of whether he embraces his destiny and continues striking out in new directions – or whether, as in the past, he continues to conceal the depth of his character and the range of his ability, and retreats from the world . . .

‘I’d pay to see Keanu Reeves in leather trousers,’ said Kenneth Branagh of his Much Ado About Nothing co-star.

CHAPTER ONE

Cool Breeze

KEANU CHARLES REEVES was born on 2 September 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon. In the 1960s the area was a Middle Eastern version of the French Riviera, not the war-torn ruin of today. His father was Samuel Nowlin Reeves, the half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian son of a wealthy Hawaiian island family from Oahu. Samuel, a geologist, was working for an oil company in Beirut when he met, fell in love with and quickly married Patricia, an English-born showgirl whom he first saw perform at a local club. She preferred to be known by the nickname Patric and had trained in London as a theatrical designer.

Staying in Beirut, the couple cut something of a Swinging Sixties dash, with Sam at the wheel of his purple Jaguar XKE and Patricia strutting her stuff in cowboy boots, blue jeans and a mink coat. The funds that fuelled their hedonistic lifestyle came from Keanu’s paternal step-grandfather Colman Abrahams, who had made his fortune by publishing a children’s edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Canada.

It wasn’t a lifestyle that was to last long, and the romance was over by the time Keanu was two years old, but not before he had been joined by a younger sister named Kim, whom Keanu was to stay close to all his life. It was from his father that the boy had gained the name that was to add to his star presence and mystery when older. Hawaiian for ‘cool breeze over the mountains’, the name was about the only thing that Keanu Reeves was to be grateful to his largely absent father for.

Samuel was gone before Keanu really got to know him. ‘There were fights about Sam’s drug-taking,’ related Keanu’s cousin, Leslie. ‘My aunt [Patricia] grew out of the hippie phase, my uncle didn’t. He refused – in fact, he couldn’t give up the drugs.’ Samuel Reeves’s drug habit never left him, and in 1994 he was arrested in Hawaii and sentenced to a decade in prison for heroin and cocaine possession.

With Samuel out of their lives, Patricia, Keanu and Kim headed to Australia for a year, before returning to the United States and settling in New York City. Keanu’s sister, Kim, recalls their childhood as being one on the road – they moved house five times in a short period. ‘I’ve no idea why,’ she remembered, ‘it’s not like the houses got bigger or anything.’ They enjoyed a happy childhood, though, and one of Kim’s fondest memories is of her older brother cheerfully dismantling the family’s meagre furniture with his junior tool-set.

In 1970, when Keanu was six, Patricia married her second husband, Broadway and Hollywood director, Paul Aaron. The marriage provoked another family upheaval, with a move to Toronto, where the couple felt it would be better to raise the children. It didn’t last, and after less than a year Aaron, too, was gone. The six months or so that Paul Aaron was around, however, served to pique the interest of Keanu Reeves in the performing arts.

All children love to perform for their parents, but when one of your parents is responsible for directing the performances of others for a living, it’s a whole different matter. For Keanu, Aaron was the first person in his life who was to view seriously his growing interests. Aaron was as close as Keanu came to having a ‘real’ father figure to guide him. Later Aaron was to play a crucial part in getting the young actor on the road to success in Hollywood.

With support from her in-laws, who lived nearby in Toronto, Patricia turned her hip ’60s fashion sense, her interest in clothes and her training in theatrical design in London into a career as a costume designer. She found employment making clothes for, among others, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and David Bowie. This new professional interest meant, like Samuel, Patricia was not around much for her children. His mother’s professional endeavours had welcome side benefits for the young – and even then, theatrical – Keanu, however. ‘Halloween was exceptional, because I’d always get a cool costume. One year, I was Dracula and wore this really cool cape. Another year I was Batman and my sister was Robin. Once she made me this Cousin Itt costume, like from The Addams Family. I wore this giant wig. It rained that Halloween. I got wet. I just looked like a big bowl of pasta.’

While she struggled to develop her new career, Patricia had two children to bring up largely on her own, and both had learning difficulties. Diagnosed dyslexic, reading and writing proved to be a problem for both Keanu and Kim, as well as for their single mother, but it was something the family strived together to overcome. Later, both children became proficient readers, but the early problems may have given Keanu more of a feel for the visual than the literary. Once he could read, though, Keanu became widely and well-read, a fact somewhat at odds with his seemingly less intellectual public persona. He is also left-handed (as seen clearly in some of the films) which proved to be another point of difference from the other kids around him.

As often as the family moved house and Keanu switched schools, so Patricia would change partners. The family seemed in permanent upheaval, a way of life carried on from Patricia’s ’60s lifestyle. Keanu’s sister Kim remembered the atmosphere in the household being reflective of whichever man was in residence at the time. ‘How we lived our lives depended on the man of the moment,’ she told People magazine. ‘When Mom was married to Paul, we dressed in white every Friday night and sang Shabbat songs, and we went to Jewish camps in the summer.’

Every so often Patricia would be called away on business and occasionally, some of her star-name clients would drop in to visit. Keanu and Kim became used to late night, loud parties. When Alice Cooper recorded Welcome to my Nightmare at a nearby studio, he stayed at the Reeves’s family home, an event vividly recalled by Keanu’s childhood chum and hockey team mate Evan Williams: ‘I remember, once, Keanu and I trying to take on Alice Cooper. He tied us up like a human knot.’

Keanu recalled the celebrity visitors and his first brush with the grown-up world of drugs. ‘There were times when groovy people would come over. I remember [Cooper] brought fake vomit and dog pooh to terrorise the housekeeper. He’d hang out, a regular dude. We got to go out to concerts and stuff. When I was fifteen, a friend of my mom’s took me to see Emmylou Harris, and I got to stay up all night. It was the first time I ever saw a person come out of the bathroom with cocaine on their nostril hair – this guy with a moustache had cocaine all over it. . .’

Keanu seems to have taken it all in his stride, and he seems to have found some much-needed stability at Toronto’s Jesse Ketchum Public School, which Keanu attended from Kindergarten through to eighth grade in 1978, aged fourteen. ‘I don’t think he ever got to class on time,’ recalled his teacher, Paula Warder. ‘When he did arrive, he wasn’t quite, well . . . with it. He always left his books at home or forgot his homework. But he’d just smile and go back home to get them. And somehow he did pass his classes.’ One teacher, though, recalled that Keanu would stay behind school and play basketball on his own, until later hooking up with his sister, Kim. It showed a lonely streak in the young Keanu, a reluctance to get too close to friends and a strong connection with his sister.

Despite the fringe show-business background at the house in the Yorkville quarter of Toronto, Keanu Reeves seems to have pursued the normal interests of any school kid. Home in the afternoon, he’d stuff himself with peanut butter and crackers, before embarking on his paper route (later sold to a friend when the route was on its last legs) and sneaking into the local flea-pit cinema to watch a double bill of second-run Bruce Lee movies. When at home, he lavished his attentions on his bull mastiff, named Jupiter. All round, it was a good and fairly privileged life. After all, it was not everyone who could boast of having their photograph taken at age six by celebrity snapper Richard Avedon.

Before long Keanu had another father figure in his life – Patricia’s third husband, Toronto rock promoter Robert Miller. Of all the men in his life to date, Miller was to stay the longest. During the five years he was part of the family, Miller added his own contribution – Karina, born when Keanu was twelve years old.

The Reeves family enjoyed a good standard of living in Toronto, a fact that Keanu was only really to appreciate years later. ‘You won’t find any stories of poverty or ghettos in this dude’s closet. When I see stuff in Los Angeles now, I realise how safe and sheltered my upbringing was. It was a great place, no graffiti, cool people. The roughest it got was when we slung chestnuts at each other and built go-karts. I was a middle-class white boy with an absent father, a strong-willed mother, and two beautiful younger sisters,’ said Keanu, defining himself and his family background.

For a while as a teenager, Keanu got seriously into the great Canadian sport of ice hockey. ‘Keanu was major hockey,’ recalled Paul Aaron in an interview in Macleans. ‘That’s all he talked about, thought about.’ He and pal Evan Williams would play regularly, and Keanu began to harbour secret ambitions of pursuing the sport professionally. ‘He was almost gangly, tall and thin, with long hair over his eyes,’ remembered John O’Flaherty, his hockey coach at the time. ‘He was always smiling, but I don’t remember him ever being neat.’

‘It’s a thrilling game,’ said Keanu of his hockey-playing days, when he was often the goalie and was so good at stopping the puck he was known simply as The Wall. ‘Lots of drama, lots of physical contact. Stop the puck, keep the puck out of the net,’ was Keanu’s own recollection of his early sporting endeavours. Although he was not to follow up on his ice hockey interest professionally, it was to serve him well in one of his earliest film roles.

His nascent sporting ambition was soon discarded in favour of his ‘thirrsst for the theeeatre’, as Keanu mockingly called his acting interest. His stepfather Paul Aaron had stayed in touch with Keanu after leaving the family, and during school vacations Keanu would fly out to stay with him, often visiting the sets of whatever production he was working on. It was Keanu’s first taste of real movie-making, spending time in Hollywood watching the production of films like A Force of One, A Different Story or NBC’s Emmy-winning TV drama The Miracle Worker. These vacation experiences strengthened Keanu’s ever-growing desire to pursue a serious acting career as soon as he possibly could.

At thirteen, just as his acting ambition was crystallising, Keanu saw his real father for the final time, before he was to be jailed. ‘I knew him up until I was six, then I saw him occasionally when I would go to Hawaii on holidays. He taught me how to roller skate, we went hunting together and he taught me how to cook. He had a je ne sais quoi about his step. I remember being little and grabbing his finger; his hands seemed so big back then. The last time I saw him was when I was thirteen. It was at night and we were in Kauai. I remember him speaking about the stars. Something about the world is a box. And I looked up, and I had no clue what he was talking about. “No, Dad, the Earth is round. It’s not a rectangle, man.” I remember his speaking about the stars as we looked up.’ After that visit, Samuel Nowlin Reeves vanished for ten years, staying out of contact with his family in Toronto.

‘He never talked about his real dad,’ remembered childhood friend Shawn Aberle. ‘If he ever came up in conversation, Keanu would change the subject. There was a lot of love in the family, certainly from the female side. But from the male side, Keanu got much more of a tough love. He felt a little bit more alone.’

This loneliness was to haunt Keanu throughout his life. During his school years he would develop an anti-authoritarian streak which often got him into trouble with teachers and was even to result in him being thrown out of one school. Without a strong father figure to guide him, Keanu was to make up his own rules of behaviour.

For most of his childhood prior to his teenage years, Keanu had seen his loyalties divided between Samuel Reeves and Paul Aaron. His final separation from his real father was to cause Keanu to build up a fear of loss that would dominate his relationships in years to come. Unable to get close to anyone as he was forever anxious that they would eventually leave him, Keanu found his romantic life restricted and limited. His drive and ambition was to be channelled into his films instead. More immediately, the absence of his father was to show in Keanu’s attitude to his schooling.

During Grades 9 and 10, when Keanu was aged between fourteen and fifteen he attended North Toronto Collegiate School, where some of his teachers noticed a vague sadness in him. ‘I don’t think he was a happy child here,’ felt drama teacher Paul Robert. He felt Keanu was too independently minded to fit into the school’s structured ways, and that clashes were inevitable.

To further his interest in acting, the teenage Keanu Reeves had begun drama classes and tried out at auditions for American TV shows and occasional movies shooting in Canada. At the same time, Keanu began having trouble at school. He went through four in quick succession, including Catholic boys’ school De La Salle College, where he failed every class, with the exception of Latin. ‘It was the only class that I liked. My attendance record was very bad. I was lazy. I knew I wanted to act when I was halfway through Grade 11, I guess, and school wasn’t important.’ Keanu clearly lacked any respect for authority during his later schooling. His inability to do as he was told was to result in early departures from several schools and to put his early acting opportunities under threat.

The one arena where Keanu could let go – other than the hockey rink – was drama class, where his teacher recalled him being head-and-shoulders above the other pupils. ‘He wanted to push farther, to do some heavy duty role playing. But most students at that age didn’t have the maturity to do it.’

Alternating between sport and theatre, Keanu stretched his mental and physical muscles. ‘Even when he was tending goal,’ recalled former coach Scott Barber, ‘he would start reciting Shakespeare.’ Keanu’s year at the private De La Salle College saw him voted Most Valuable Player as goalie for the hockey team. Out of school, he continued his interest by working at a hockey rink, sharpening skates.

Work in a restaurant called Pastissima, where he made 100 pounds of pasta a day, helped Keanu’s income. He was known to shut up the restaurant at odd times of the day and night in order to head off for acting auditions around Toronto. His boss didn’t mind, though, as the good-looking teenager had a way with the customers. Although waiting on tables, Keanu would never miss the opportunity to put on a show, and his good-natured theatrical kidding proved a draw for customers.

He got his first taste of stage work at De La Salle College in a school production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Asking the question ‘What am I?’ on-stage, an appreciative female member of the audience was heard to mutter ‘A hunk . . .’ It was an early indication of the interest Keanu Reeves was to generate in some sections of his audiences.

To further his chances of gaining employment in theatre, Keanu enrolled in the newly opened Toronto High School for the Performing Arts, forsaking De La Salle for a more theatre-oriented education. There were 25 places available and all Keanu had to his credit was one appearance in The Crucible. He was up against other kids with much more professional theatre experience than himself. Surprising his mother – who had reluctantly given him permission to try out for the school – and himself, Keanu was offered a place. ‘That became his sole abiding interest,’ recalled Paul Aaron, as hockey fell a poor second in Keanu’s interests. ‘I mean, every part of it – the voice, the movement, the contemporary, the classic . . .’

Despite giving the school his all, Keanu was asked to leave, according to hockey pal Evan Williams, after a disagreement about dramatic technique with one of his teachers. To finish the ‘discussion’ the teacher told Keanu he’d just have to bite the bullet, to which the cocky youth replied: ‘Yeah, but I don’t have to eat the whole rifle!’

Keanu and canine friend relaxing together.

‘I’m not very good with authority,’ admitted Keanu later. ‘When people in school kept trying to tell me what to do, it would infuriate me. When I don’t feel free and can’t do what I want, I just react. I go against it.’

His teen rebellion was limited – at sixteen Keanu had asked his mother’s permission to become an actor – but he did have his moments. ‘When I was seventeen, I had my first car, a 1969 122 Volvo. It was British racing green with bricks holding up the front seat, and a good stereo. I remember being with some friends and driving that car from Toronto to Buffalo to see the Ramones and that was very adventurous. There was a punk rock girl in the back seat with a racoon on her shoulder and the Clash was playing loud, and all these questions were running through my head: would we make it? We’re under-age, can we get in? You know, drinking and watching the Ramones. It was such a good time.’

While he appreciated the good times being a teenager, Keanu knew he would have to work at it if he was serious about becoming an actor. Going back to school and taking serious classes seemed to be the only way forward for him. ‘That didn’t really happen until I was seventeen or eighteen,’ he admitted. ‘I started taking acting courses at night. It just seemed the thing to do. Most of it was out of respect for acting. I worked at some Stanislavsky stuff and I was playing around with sense memory. I got started crashing auditions and then I got some jobs and joined the community theatre.’

By 1983, aged nineteen and thrown out of his first acting school, Keanu Reeves decided to give achieving his ambition one last shot. Every Sunday he would attend a community theatre school called Leah Posluns. He was not the best potential actor the school had enrolled, but director Rose Dubin was impressed by the Shakespeare soliloquy he performed during his try-out. The same could not be said for the judges at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, who were less than impressed, twice rejecting his applications to join their summer Shakespeare troupe. Not to be stopped, Keanu spent the summer – in his first real trip alone away from home – at the Hedgerow Theatre in Pennsylvania, studying under Jasper Deeter. At the time, Keanu was definitely fixated on Shakespeare as the essence of true drama, and was pursuing acting as a means of getting on stage. Movies were not high on the young would-be actor’s agenda. He wanted to be a ‘proper’ actor.

‘To perform Shakespeare you get to say very profound words and in the body it feels more thrilling. Your spirit, your intellect, your heart and your voice all have to, at a very high degree, melt into the speaking of words and behaviour. For me all of these things are missing in action pictures. In Shakespeare, it’s pure.’ Keanu retained his teenage infatuation with the words and emotions of the Bard, it being influential in his later performances in My Own Private Idaho (loosely based by director Gus Van Sant on Henry IV), Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing and his run on stage in Winnipeg playing the title character in Hamlet.

Keanu’s attendance at Leah Posluns was to lead to his first genuine stage experience outside of school plays. He struck up a friendship with another wannabe young actor, Alan Powell, who found that beyond a certain point Keanu wouldn’t even let friends get to know him. ‘We’d play off each other,’ said Powell, of co-starring with Keanu in school workshop productions. ‘The chemistry was dynamic. He was the friend I’d never had as a child. But he was a secretive guy about his life. You could be hanging with the guy for three years; suddenly he’d introduce you to someone who turned out to be a friend of his all that time. You could never get close to the guy.’

Keanu did value his work with Powell – the practice led to him winning through an audition and scoring his first legitimate theatre role in 1984’s Wolfboy. This homoerotic theatrical oddity, written by Brad Fraser and staged at Toronto’s Passe Muraille Theatre, had Keanu cast as a young innocent placed in a psychiatric hospital, only to be set upon by a deranged boy who believes he’s a werewolf. He almost didn’t get the part, failing to impress director John Palmer. ‘His diction was a mess,’ said Palmer. ‘He would skip words and say lines like he was trying to figure out what they meant.’

However, there was a star quality about Keanu even then, something that caught Palmer’s attention. He called it an energy and a glow. ‘I didn’t want professional actors, so I advertised in the personals. I got totally fucked-up hustlers – and Keanu.’

In what was to be the beginning of the ‘Is Keanu Gay?’ question that was to dog the rest of his career, Wolfboy played largely to Toronto’s gay community. ‘You get this innocent kid,’ said Palmer, ‘one of the most gorgeous kids anyone’s ever seen, in white shorts – and we oiled them . . . what do you want for ten bucks?’

Co-starring with Keanu was Carl Marotte, playing the street hustler who befriends and then kills Keanu’s character with a sensual bite to the neck (shades of his later experience in Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Marotte claimed he and Keanu took the play’s homoerotic undertones in their strides, but did struggle when asked to become more explicit for a series of still photographs being shot to promote the play. ‘We asked them to test the boundaries,’ admitted photographer David Hlynsky, who sprayed the pair of bare-chested stars with water for the required ‘sweaty glow’. Hlynsky suggested the actors should kiss and caress each other. ‘They were both apprehensive about it, but they understood the sexual tension in the parts they were playing.’ Hlynsky was around Keanu a lot during this ‘gay’ period and couldn’t help but notice his attraction for both sexes. He definitely saw in Keanu a connection with another young star of the past. ‘Keanu had a James Dean charisma,’ asserted the photographer, whose early pictures captured some of Keanu’s developing star power. ‘He’s a beautiful man in an androgynous way. The Toronto gay community was turned on by Keanu and still is. I know he and his mother were very happy with the pictures, because she told me so.’

‘Testing the boundaries’: Keanu and his Wolfboy co-star Carl Marotte.

How to capitalise on his sex appeal, to both men and women, was something that Keanu was to learn very early on in his acting career and use to great advantage much later. A friend suggested that, whatever he said later, at the time he enjoyed his Wolfboy experience. ‘He had no qualms about the play . . . in fact, he was very enthusiastic because it was so offbeat and shocking.’ Wolfboy was a big hit in Toronto’s gay community, and proved to be a good calling card for Keanu – although later on when mainstream stardom beckoned, all memory of the play would be expunged from his official list of credits.

The role won the aspiring actor his first Equity card – and his first bad reviews. Although the gay community loved the play, mainstream Toronto critics were not as impressed. In April 1984 the Toronto Globe and Mail dubbed the play ‘a real howler’, while the Toronto Sun went for the obvious headline: ‘Bloody Awful: Awful Bloody’. The paper awarded the company’s efforts its lowest critical rating – one star. However, neither Keanu nor John Palmer was particularly put out by this savaging at the hands of the critics – they knew who their audience were and they were coming to the theatre in droves.

While at Leah Posluns, Keanu scored his first professional television credit. ‘The first professional role that I got was on a Canadian show called Hangin’ In. It’s about a youth counselling centre. I was really lucky to get on it – lots of Canadian actors get their lucky breaks on it.’ Although he had only one line in what amounted to little more than a bit part on the show, it was a beginning for Keanu. He saw it as leading directly onto other work. ‘Hangin’ In is a godsend for young actors in Toronto . . . They give lots of roles out to young kids. It was a threecamera shoot, and I played a tough street kid. I wore stupid clothes and had no idea of what I was doing. My line was, “Hey lady, can I use the shower?”’

The appearance in Hangin’ In did lead to further work for the actor, as well as to an agent – Tracy Moore at Noble Talent. Using a shower was her first piece of advice to the wannabe actor. Keanu had a habit of putting personal hygiene way down on his list of priorities, such were his scatterbrained ways. ‘We didn’t want him to be remembered as a smelly, sloppy kid,’ recalled Moore of her new client. ‘His attitude was that didn’t have anything to do with his acting ability.’

Keanu did more community theatre, and a couple of TV shows, Night Heat (as ‘Thug 1’) and The Comedy Factory, as well as one-shot TV commercials, one for Coca Cola and one for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes breakfast cereal. ‘I once did an advert for Kellogg’s that got me loads of money. I didn’t put it in the bank, I just put it in a basket and dipped into it when I needed it. Now I pay very careful attention to everything – well, my accountant does,’ said Keanu of his early adventures in advertising.

The actor’s first real big break also came from another Leah Posluns connection – this time to Hollywood rather than theatre. Movie director Steven Stern had links with the school through his sister, and he had Keanu audition for a part in a TV movie entitled Young Again which he was due to shoot. ‘There was something about him I liked as a person. Funny, yet a serious side. I told him to take the script home and read it for the lead,’ recalled Stern.