At 62, he has survived more than most, chased fame less than anyone, and built a life on kindness that costs him nothing and means everything.
By Sondra Barr
Keanu Reeves turns 62 in September, and his calendar is fuller than it was at 40. He spent last fall making his Broadway debut in one of the hardest plays in the English language, and this spring he put out an album with the rock band he started in his 20s and climbed back on a tour bus. For a man who has never seemed to want anything from fame, he keeps saying yes.
The cottage industry devoted to marveling at his decency is built almost entirely on things other people reported. He gave Rolexes to his stunt team on John Wick: Chapter 4. He picked up the tab when the cast and crew of the last Matrix film took a trip to San Francisco. He funded a private cancer foundation after his sister Kim’s long fight with leukemia and never put his name on it. What is striking is not that he does these things. It is that he never talks about them.
Keanu Charles Reeves was born in 1964, in Beirut, Lebanon, to an English costume designer named Patricia Taylor and an American father who left when Reeves was 3. His mother moved the children through New York and Sydney before settling in Toronto, where stepfathers came and went and Reeves passed through several high schools without collecting a diploma.
He has never played that as tragedy. “When I see stuff in L.A. now, I realize how safe and sheltered my upbringing [in Toronto] was. We didn’t even do graffiti, you know?” he told Interview magazine in 1991, in a cover story the magazine reprinted in 2022. “I mean we did sling chestnuts at teachers’ heads.”
What he collected instead were enthusiasms, and he has kept nearly all of them. Punk rock: “The Ramones changed my life,” he said in that same interview. Books: he was rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Motorcycles: he named a 1974 Norton Commando as the great love of his life and admitted he had wrecked it more than once. “But I love that bike, man.”
And acting, which he described at 26 in terms that still explain most of what came after. “For me, acting is very self-involved, especially between projects,” he said. “Once you get a part, you’re liberated. You can find out what that character thinks.”
Hollywood underestimated him early, and he let it. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure made him famous in 1989 and stuck him with a reputation for being as vacant as the character. He does not appear to hold a grudge. “I think they still use, like, ‘Keanu’s Excellent Adventure.’ Or ‘dude,'” he told GQ in 20219. “That’s still around.”
The interesting part is what he did with all that low expectation. He spent it. In 1991 alone he made Point Break for Kathryn Bigelow and My Own Private Idaho for Gus Van Sant, and the second was a genuine professional risk that apparently did not feel like one. He and River Phoenix, he told GQ, decided it the way young men decide things: “It was more like standing 100 feet in the air, and there’s this beautiful pool of water, and you’re looking at each other like, ‘You want to jump? Yeah, let’s jump!'”
Speed made him a movie star in 1994. He turned down the sequel to play Hamlet onstage in Winnipeg, and the studio made him pay for it. “I didn’t work with [Fox] again until The Day the Earth Stood Still,” he said. That is a decade in the wilderness, described without a trace of bitterness.
He absorbed losses in those years that would have flattened most people. Phoenix died in 1993. In 1999, the daughter Reeves was expecting with Jennifer Syme was stillborn, and Syme died in a car crash 18 months later. He has never traded on any of it. When GQ asked what finally got him thinking about the shape of his own career, somewhere in his mid-40s, he gave a cheerful one-word answer: “Death.” Then he changed the subject to Anthony Quinn.
It was 1994, and Reeves was 29, shooting A Walk in the Clouds in the Napa Valley. Quinn, about to turn 80, played the family patriarch. Over lunch one day, Reeves watched him work the phone between setups, checking in with his people, seeing what he had booked. Six decades and two Oscars in, Quinn was still selling himself. “Still hustling,” Reeves said, still marveling about it 25 years later. “I was like, Whoa.”
The next morning the two of them had a long walking shot to get through, alone in the mist and the rows of vines.
“Anthony?” Reeves asked. “Is it always going to be like this?”
“Yes,” Quinn said.
“There’s this idea that, like, at some point you’re going to be set,” Reeves told GQ. “And then maybe there won’t be so much working on working.”
He never got set. That may be the best thing that ever happened to him.
The John Wick films arrived in 2014, when Reeves was 50, and handed him a second act almost nobody in his business gets. He spread out rather than cashed in. In 2011 he had co-founded ARCH Motorcycle with designer Gard Hollinger, building bikes by hand in Hawthorne, California. He co-created the comic series BRZRKR and co-wrote a novel with China Mieville. He has been with the artist Alexandra Grant since they met in 2009, and their first collaboration was a book, not a red carpet.
Mostly, though, he went back to the bass. Dogstar, the band he started in the early ’90s and got mocked for, reunited during the pandemic and became a serious part of his life. “I just want a bass in my hands at all times,” he told Bass Magazine in July. “Whether I’m on the phone or watching a movie, I need to be holding one and playing.”
Ask what he is chasing onstage and the answer doubles as a philosophy of aging. “I’m looking to have fun. I’m looking to pay attention. I’m looking to listen,” he said. Ask his role in the band and the answer is funnier. “I’m called ‘Switzerland.’ I mediate, I’m in the middle, and I solve conflicts.”
Last September, at 61, he made his Broadway debut in Waiting for Godot opposite Alex Winter, his Bill and Ted co-star and friend of nearly 40 years. The idea was his own. “I was in a hotel room. I was thinking about what Alex and I could work on again,” he told NPR. “And then it just struck me: Waiting for Godot.”
Asked what he was feeling before opening, he did not pretend to be serene. “Terror, anxiety, hope,” he said. He did it anyway, eight shows a week, and what made it possible was four decades of trust. “We had a trust and confidence in our art practice through our friendship,” he told Gothamist.
In May, Dogstar released its fourth album, All In Now, and hit the road. More films are coming. At 62, he is still starting things he is not yet good at.
Quinn’s answer, handed to a 29-year-old in a foggy vineyard, turns out to have been a kindness. Yes, it is always going to be like this. There will always be another part to chase, another song to learn, another thing you have not done yet.
