It seems that every time Keanu Reeves pops up in the news, people love him even more…if that’s possible.
From giving up his seat on the subway to promoting kindness with his every action, he’s just about the most perfect human being on the planet (seemingly).
And now he’s upping his game, as people realize that when he poses for pictures with fans, he avoids touching them.
He’s had a hard life, from his father leaving him at a young age to the birth of a stillborn daughter and the loss of both his partner and his friend, River Phoenix.
While some people are cynical enough to believe he doesn’t touch women in pictures as a way to avoid being accused of sexual harassment, most of us know the truth.
Recently on Twitter, someone posted this photo of Keanu Reeves talking to a kid and… wait… what’s going on with the water… and that glass… is that wine?!?
In the past, he forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and then had the bot write a new “Triple D” episode based on what it saw.
I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and then asked it to write a Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives episode of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/NvfODhiuUi
He also gave Olive Garden commercials the same treatment last year.
(Pro tip: That’s the place you bring your family when they’re in town from Italy, FYI.)
I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/CKiDQTmLeH
This time, Patti forced a bot to watch more than 1,000 hours of John Wick footage (I’m assuming just the two available films on an endless loop) and then a new, originalscreenplay emerged.
I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of the John Wick movies and then asked it to write a John Wick movie of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/jIQV6WA2Yn
Keanu Reeves has been in a lot of great movies over the years: Point Break, River’s Edge, Speed, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to name a few. But it seems he’s more popular than ever right now because of the huge success of the John Wick movies.
And now that there’s a new Bill and Ted movie slated for release in 2021, people are even more pumped on Keanu!
Reeves grew up in Canada and was a goalie when he played ice hockey. He appeared as a goalie in the 1986 movie Youngblood and was even offered a tryout by the Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League. Reeves decided to pursue acting instead.
2. International man
Reeves grew up in Canada but not many people know he was actually born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1964. He also spent some of his early years in Australia and New York City before he ended up in Toronto.
3. Declined
Reeves was on board to make a sequel to the hit movie Speed until he read the script and saw how bad it was. He apparently turned down between $11 million and $12 million to return and make the sequel.
He’s taken major pay cuts over the years to work with legendary actors, including Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate and Gene Hackman in The Replacements.
7. Riding high
Reeves is a motorcycle enthusiast and he’s paid the price over the years. Various accidents have resulted in a ruptured spleen, a broken ankle, and lost teeth, among other injuries.
Even though he became a big star in the 1990s, Reeves didn’t buy a permanent place to live in Los Angeles until 2008. He lived in hotels and even in on-set trailers for a long time.
9. A team player
Reeves is known as a lovely, generous person and here’s at least some of the proof. He made a fortune acting in The Matrix films, but he gave away $75 million to the special effects and costume teams, and he bought the entire stunt team Harley Davidson motorcycles.
It seems like only yesterday I saw Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure at Oak Park Mall in my hometown in Kansas. It was glorious…and I still quote the movie to this day.
The film celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2019, and in honor of this most excellent piece of cinema, we’d like to present you with 10 facts about the movie.
But first, check out the original trailer for a refresher.
1. The duo were born in an improv class
Classmates Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson formed an improv workshop at UCLA. Solomon recalled, “One day, we decided to do a couple of guys who knew nothing about history, talking about history. The initial improv was them studying history, while Ted’s father kept coming up to ask them to turn their music down.”
2. There was originally another character, Bob
Bill, Bob, & Ted? When the skit originated, the guy who played “Bob” wasn’t crazy about it, so Solomon and Matheson got rid of him and stuck with Bill and Ted.
We all know Keanu Reeves plays Ted and Alex Winter plays Bill, but both actors originally auditioned for the opposite roles. Keanu Reeves remembered, “I got a call saying that I got the part. So I went to the wardrobe fitting… assuming I was playing Bill, and I get there and Alex Winter, who eventually played Bill, went to the wardrobe fitting thinking he was playing Ted. Then we were informed that that wasn’t the case.”
4. Pauly Shore in the mix
Shore, along with hundreds of other actors, auditioned for the role of Ted. Hey, don’t feel too bad for him, he got to be in Encino Man.
Reeves and Winter weren’t nerdy enough for the roles, according to co-writer Ed Solomon. He said,
“Bill and Ted were conceived in our minds as these 14-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bellbottoms and heavy metal T-shirts. We actually had a scene that was even shot, with Bill and Ted walking past a group of popular kids who hate them. But once you cast Alex and Keanu, who look like pretty cool guys, that was hard to believe.”
6. Hard to picture this one
We all know Bill and Ted travel through time in a phone booth, but it was originally supposed to be a van: a 1969 Chevy van to be precise. Warner Bros. showed early interest in the script and folks there thought a time-traveling van sounded too close to the hit Back to the Future. Director Stephen Herek suggested a phone booth because he thought the visuals would be impressive.
Plus, Doctor Who hadn’t really made it in the States yet.
7. A happy accident
Alex Winter called the casting of the legendary George Carlin “a very happy accident.” Winter added they were originally looking for serious actors at first, “like Sean Connery. And someone had the idea, way after we started shooting, of George. That whole movie was a happy accident. No one thought it would ever see the light of day.”
8. The booth is out there
As part of a promotion when the Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure came out in 1991, one lucky winner received the actual phone booth from the film. Reddit tracked down the winner, Kenneth Grayson, in 2011 and he participated in an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A.
9. They’re coming back!
Rumors have been floating around for years that there will be a third film in the series (after 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) and now it’s official.
Keanu Reeves is undeniably America’s sweetheart these days. Not content with being the star of blockbuster franchises like John Wick and The Matrix, Keanu has apparently also been on a decades-long secret campaign to quietly establish himself as one of the nicest guys in showbiz.
And here are 11 more stories that prove what everyone already knows by now: Keanu is the man.
Keanu came to the movie theater I worked at in Sydney in 2001. He was working on the Matrix series at the time. It’s a quiet, Wednesday morning — almost nobody is seeing movies.
I’m working the box office, bored as hell and suddenly this dude walks up in jeans, a leather jacket and a horse riding helmet. A full ass, weird equestrian looking helmet. It takes me a solid 30 seconds to ignore the helmet and realize it’s Keanu Reeves
He wants to buy a ticket for “From Hell,” the Johnny Depp movie. I’m so fucking star struck I do what any sensible 16-year-old does and tell him I’d like to give him my employee discount. This means he needs to sign my sheet and therefore I have his autograph
“I don’t work here,” Keanu says. Seemingly confused by my offer. I’m flustered and just charge him the normal price. Kicking myself after for not getting his autograph
“I realized you probably wanted my autograph,” he says. “So I signed this.” He hands me a receipt from the concessions stand that he signed on the back. He then casually throws an ice cream cone in the trash can and sees his movie
Keanu 4ever. Saw this man sitting on a fire hydrant in NYC. A fucking fire hydrant. & he looked cool doing it. Mustered the courage to speak to him as he’s getting up & he was the nicest guy on the planet. Let me take 2 selfies because my hand was shaking too much the first time. pic.twitter.com/XvQKPix1cX
Shortly after bill and Ted came out, 8 year old me saw him at Newark airport. Went up to him and asked “are you keanu reeves?” “Yea, I am.” He spoke to my older brother and I for 45 minutes and gave us his number. He was awesome to spend that time with. We called but missed him.
in the wake of all this keanu appreciation, a reminder that keanu used to come to the bookstore i worked at every wednesday night on his motorcycle to buy new fiction and sudoku puzzles and would always call 20 minutes in advance and i love him so much
In his Matrix days he went to the strip club my husband was the door man at and he saw Keanu and carded him anyway and he made no fuss about it. Once he came back out to leave he signed autographs for a lot of staff.
My husband said his friend who worked there drove home real quick to grab his Bill and Ted movie for Keanu to sign and Keanu told him he loved that he had that movie. Cuz apparently nobody had seen it, everyone was just obsessed with The Matrix only.
“A friend of mine told me that she was once stranded on the side of a highway outside LA when her jalopy broke down. She had no cell phone (that was before most people had cell phones) and no way to call for help. Then a nice black porsche pulls over and as you can guess, it was Keanu. He tried to help her jump start the car and when it didn’t work, he called AAA for her.
When they towed her car, he offered her to drive her home, which she accepted. He drove about 50 miles out of his destination just to drive her home. She told me she hoped he would hit on her but he didn’t, he was just a gentleman, dropped her at her house, gave her his phone number and told her to call him if she needed further help.”
He just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t he?
Keanu Reeves might just be one of the best, nicest guys in Hollywood. Obviously, his acting career is incredibly impressive, with credits like Point Break and The Matrix to his name. All that success could easily go to his head, but he prefers to live a quiet life that few know about.
Today, let’s take a look at Keanu Reeves, the man.
The Internet’s outpouring of heartwarming encounters with Keanu Reeves is an antidote to everything that is wrong with the news cycle. https://t.co/rIjnvm84VN
Off-screen, Reeves has been known to take part in funding children’s charities on the down low.
Why? Because he’s a humble “do-gooder” for no other reason than to give back. Pretty cool, right?
“I have a private foundation that’s been running for five or six years, and it helps aid a couple of children’s hospitals and cancer research,” Keanu said in 2009 (according to Snopes) in a Ladies Home Journal article.
“I don’t like to attach my name to it, I just let the foundation do what it does.”
Apparently, this was inspired by his sister, who battled Leukemia back in the 1990s. Luckily, her disease was declared in remission by doctors, spring-boarding Reeves into his charitable groove. Not only does he fund cancer and children’s charities, but he’s also been known to participate in phone drives.
“Public efforts found him manning the phones at a Stand Up to Cancer telethon in 2008,” the List mentions in an article. “Stars like Reeves generously gave their time and used their star power to encourage fans to become callers, donors and participants in the efforts to heal cancer.”
— keanu reeves love bot (@rivsreeves) June 3, 2019
But his heart-felt generosity doesn’t stop there. He enjoys taking care of others. Like buying his mother a new house and giving millions of dollars to the crew of The Matrix! He insisted the special FX and costume design teams were the real heroes of the movies, gifting them each $1 million.
In the end, money does not equal happiness to him.
“For me, I guess I don’t connect the enjoyment and the money,” Reeves told the New York Post. “I work on a part and hopefully realize a part, and make good films. Some of the successes I’ve had I’m grateful for, because it creates other opportunities. [The way] I look at it is I get to act again.”
Going one step further, Tim Allen wraps up Reeves’ personality in a recent interview.
Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear) talked about the Toy Story 4 on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and said: “New guys are in it. Keanu Reeves has got a great part in it. Inside story, even the fun, gentle guy that he is, even he said [about his own character], ‘This sounds too much like Buzz Lightyear.’”
He didn’t want to step on Allen’s toes!
And I guess that proves my point: Keanu Reeves is the best guy in Hollywood.
Keanu Reeves often foregoes some of his paycheck so that producers can bring on other notable actors. On The Devil’s Advocate, he reduced his salary by a few million dollars so that they could afford Al Pacino, and he did the same thing on The Replacements to be able to work with Gene Hackman. 00
Keanu Reeves was sued by a woman who suggested that he used hypnosis and impersonated her ex-husband to impregnate her. She sought $3 million in spousal support from the actor, and $150,000/month, retroactively, in child support. DNA test proved he was not the father and the suit was thrown out. 00
Keanu Reeves turned down a $10 million offer for the main role in Speed 2, in favor of touring with his band and playing Hamlet in a theater production. 00