Keanu Reeves wasn't sad.
"I'm just eating a sandwich, man!" the actor insisted on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2021 when the host showed him the photo that evolved into the infamous "Sad Keanu" meme.
"I was thinking," Reeves added. "I had some stuff going on. I was hungry."
So, that's one mystery about one of Hollywood's most enigmatic public figures solved. Though "stuff going on" could theoretically contain multitudes. Asked why he was so meme-able, Reeves' answer was, "I have no clue, sir."
Still, when you have one of the last real-deal movie stars on your show, you don't skip the chance to ask the really deep questions.
Stephen Colbert got memorably introspective with Reeves in 2019, asking, "What do you think happens when we die?"
"I know that the ones that love us will miss us," the Matrix star said sagely, rendering Colbert uncharacteristically speechless. Because he probably didn't expect the answer to be indisputable.
Neither could have predicted that the next time they spoke it would be on Zoom, with Colbert in an almost-empty New York studio after months of taping his show at home due to the pandemic and Reeves thousands of miles away in Berlin.
But the melancholy twist in that 2019 interview, as opposed to the more lighthearted mid-pandemic chat they had, was par for the course for the thoughtful student of life that Reeves is.
"I haven't really thought about my career future, or what was going to happen, until really recently," he told GQ in 2019 while on his promotional tour for John Wick: Chapter 3— Parabellum, the seemingly penultimate installment in the surprise-hit franchise about a not-so-retired hitman cloaked in grief who can't stop coming up with new ways to exact vengeance on evildoers.
Asked why he had started thinking about the future, in any respect, he replied, "Death!"
Celebrating his 59th birthday on Sept. 2, the still eerily youthful-looking Reeves has long since become a brand unto himself, signifying not just movie stardom but also a state of mind, be it chill and zen or almost comically intense.
His first name—which has lent itself to a comedy about a cat and a hit song by Logic, and which of course a studio exec wanted him to change when he first came to Hollywood—does mean "cool breeze over the mountains" in Hawaiian, after all.
But still waters run deep, and despite being in the public eye for almost 40 years, he's one of the least-known people whose chiseled face you would recognize anywhere. Few have played it as close to the vest as Reeves, who, though he does interviews and shows up to fulfill his side of the bargain in promoting his films, has managed for decades to avoid talking about his personal life.
And not in the way that most celebrities say they don't like to talk about their personal lives.
"I came to Hollywood to be in movies," Reeves told Parade in 2019. "I feel really grateful that I've had that opportunity, but I'm just a private person, and it's nice that can still exist."
He doesn't even publicize his charity work, but his causes include children's hospitals, fighting cancer, the arts and the environment. He's also been known to give generous gifts to his stunt crews (the John Wick: Chapter 4 team got Rolex Submariners) or play Kern County tour guide when his plane is rerouted to Bakersfield and he and his fellow stranded passengers need busing to L.A.
"I always find it surreal that complete strangers come up and ask me personal questions," he told Parade back in 2008. "I don't mind speaking about work, but when the talk turns to 'Who are you?' and 'What do you do off-screen?' I'm like, 'Get out of here.' I've been in situations where people have felt they had a relationship with me or something and I didn't even know who they were."
Trust him, when you have a relationship with Reeves, you'll know—even if the world doesn't catch up for awhile. For whatever reason he picked November 2019 as the time to reveal, on the red carpet at the LACMA Art + Film Gala, that he had been coupled up for years (and possibly an entire decade) with artist Alexandra Grant, his partner in the Los Angeles-based X Artists' Books.
Of course, it's not as if he confirmed any of that in words, but some investigation soon followed. They met at a dinner party in 2009 (according to a New York Times T Magazine piece from 2018) and embarked on at least a creative collaboration fairly immediately with the tongue-in-cheek self-care guide Ode to Happiness.
Not that Reeves is an anti-star. He lives in the Hollywood Hills, spent plenty of time enjoying the local nightlife in his youth, memorably jammed on the side with his own band (Dogstar, which broke up in the early '00s but has since jammed some more), and has starred in countless quotable action movies.
And he gets paid handsomely for them, enough so that he can take off and do passion projects like his first (and only, to date) directorial effort, 2013's The Man of Tai Chi, or show up unheralded on the Pop sitcom Swedish Dicks and do any indie film he so desires, like 2018's Destination Wedding, which re-teamed him with Bram Stoker's Dracula co-star and once-rumored wife Winona Ryder.
He also stole the show spoofing himself in a top-secret cameo in the hit Netflix rom-com Always Be My Maybe, playing "Keanu Reeves" as an over-the-top philosopher who at the end of the day (or a 12-course meal and an impromptu brawl) is still your average indulgent movie star.
But we're happy to indulge him a bit.
Ted, Johnny Utah, Jack Travern, Neo, John Wick: all characters that in hindsight had to be played by Reeves. He's done everything from Shakespeare (he turned down Speed 2 to play Hamlet onstage in Canada) to sports flicks to A Scanner Darkly, and in 2019 you heard his voice as Duke Caboom, a motorcycle-riding stuntman with a wistful backstory, in Toy Story 4, which made more than $1 billion, easily overtaking The Matrix Reloaded ($742 million worldwide) as his single highest-grossing movie.
"So I made Duke a little more gravelly but still tried to give him energy and a big personality," Reeves shared with Entertainment Weekly in March 2020. "I just thought that Duke should love what he does. He's the greatest stuntman in Canada! I wanted him to be constantly doing poses on the bike while he was talking, to have this great extroverted passion."
In real life, he's perfectly congenial yet usually looks somewhat serious, but not because he's taking himself seriously—it's more as if he wants to answer even the most lighthearted of questions with respectful gravity. But hey, as Colbert found out, if you ask Reeves a potentially loaded question, prepare to get an answer.
Asked by Parade in 2008 if he believed in aliens, because he was playing the alien Klaatu in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, he replied, "Some days I do. Some days I don't. There's so much unexplained and unexplainable phenomena that's presented to us. But beyond that, the cosmos is so vast. We can't be the only sentient entity. It might not look like us, but it's going to be out there."
His signature Keanu cadence used to be mistaken for a sign of vacuity, but Reeves attributed however he came off in interviews to his overall discomfort with talking about himself.
"I've never played stupid to keep someone distant," he told Vanity Fair in 1995. "I don't play stupid. Either it's been a failure on my part to articulate, or my naivete, or ingenuousness, or sometimes it's the nature of the form... And you know, I find myself more able to give an explanation of a project five years later than in the middle of it. It's so present-tense! I can tell you how I feel, but its context is harder to explain... Sometimes when I'm interviewed I'm not ready to do that. So you say...'excellent!' And you know what, man? It's OK."
It certainly was.
All this time Reeves has probably been more intent on protecting Grant's privacy than anything else, but now that his relationship status is officially out there, the man whose mantra, or lack thereof, remains "whatever, man," isn't too cagey to acknowledge his domestic situation.
"It's been really wonderful to be with Alexandra," he shared with Parade during the summer or 2020 on his virtual joint press tour for the years-in-the-developing Bill and Ted Face the Music. "We enjoy each other's company, you know, whatever that may be. Once the beaches opened up, we went for a motorcycle ride, and we have a couple of projects. We have a book company together, X Artists' Books, and she's doing her art."
"I've got some creative things going on: working on a comic book, trying to do a documentary, working on a television series and then working on a script for [the next] John Wick, another Matrix film that's in a holding pattern," he said. "I don't have kids or anything like that, so I get to be less responsible! The day is kind of like, 'What, creatively, can I do?'"
He said his first post-pandemic trip would be a motorcycle trip through Europe—which sounded about right for the longtime rider.
Among his various side hustles, in addition to his publishing company he co-owns a custom bike shop called ARCH Motorcycle in Hawthorne, Calif., because he loves traveling on two wheels as much as you think he does.
"Riding can be a place to think and feel. It's a way to work things out," he told Parade, noting that inclement weather doesn't stop him. "I like riding in the rain. It's a little more sketchy." He rides mainly alone, but he and the ARCH crew could be found cruising the Pacific Coast Highway on Sunday mornings.
And if motorcycles have provided one soul-soothing salve for Reeves, his day job provides another.
"In acting, you're constantly discovering new feelings and thoughts and exposing yourself to them," he told Parade in 2008. "I guess it could be considered psycho-therapy. All I know is that, as an actor, I can tell you a story that you'll listen to. Maybe it won't just entertain you, it might also teach you something. I think film has the power to change your life if you want to let it."
Combine his real-life inscrutability with his is-it-genius-or-does-he-just-do-the-same-thing-every-time approach to acting, and he's become more myth than man—and that, too, is a huge part of his appeal. He's just so Keanu.
"I don't own a computer and I don't e-mail," he said in the 2008 Parade interview. "I'm fascinated by people who freak out when they don't get an instant response to an e-mail. It's like they expect as soon as they send an e-mail to get the answer back and if they don't it's like awful. I just hope people won't totally lose the ability to write letters because it's a good way to communicate."
He preferred typewriters, Reeves said—and we can only hope he and Toy Story star Tom Hanks had a chance to talk about typewriters together.
Reeves was born in Beirut, to a Hawaiian father and English mother, but they divorced when he was about 2. Mom Patricia remarried in the US., but after that didn't work out she settled with a 7-year-old Reeves and his younger sister, Kim, who was born in Australia, in Toronto. (In a 2000 Rolling Stone interview, it was reported that Reeves hadn't spoken to his dad since he was 13.)
"We were latchkey kids," he told Esquire in 2017. "It was basically 'leave the house in the morning and come back at night'. It was cool." But, he told Parade, "Even for a runaway English girl, my mother gave us a proper upbringing. We learned manners, respect for our elders, formal table settings. I also learned a nonprejudicial, nonjudgmental acceptance of other people."
His favorite part of school was doing plays and studying Shakespeare in English class, so he dropped out at 17 to try his hand at acting.
"My attendance record was very bad. I was lazy," Reeves told Vanity Fair. "I knew I wanted to act when I was halfway through grade 11, I guess, and school wasn't important."
His first acting job came on the Canadian series Hangin' In in 1984. Then he moved to Los Angeles and made his big-screen debut in the Rob Lowe-starring drama Youngblood in 1986. Later that year he won his first major role in the gritty teen crime drama River's Edge, which went on to win Best Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards.
So it was off to the races for Reeves, who in the next five years made a wildly diverse array of movies, including the very-'80s comedy The Night Before, Dangerous Liaisons, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (and its sequel, Bogus Journey), Parenthood, Point Break and My Own Private Idaho.
He was very much living the fast Hollywood life, though it wasn't all charmed.
In 1993, River Phoenix died of an accidental drug overdose—another painful thing Reeves didn't want to talk about, but he spoke fondly of his friend and My Own Private Idaho co-star.
"I enjoyed his company. Very much," Reeves told Rolling Stone in 2000. "And enjoyed his mind and his spirit and his soul. We brought good out in each other. He was a real original thinker. He was not the status quo. In anything."
As for Phoenix's death, "It's something he thinks about all the time, something he never really talks about," a friend of Reeves' told People. "Friends know not to go there with him."
(Reeves later told The Guardian that it wasn't getting older that made him think more about the people he'd lost over the course of his life. "It's always with you, but like an ebb and flow," he said. Asked if he thought about anyone in particular, he replied, "Lots of people.")
In 1994 his estranged father, Samuel, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug possession in Hawaii, but was released in two. "Jesus, man. No, the story with me and my dad's pretty heavy. It's full of pain and woe and fucking loss and all that s--t," he told RS around that time. In 1995, he told Vanity Fair, when asked why he didn't want to know more about his dad's case, "Why would I want to find out what I didn't know?" He called the situation "pretty incredible," and that was that.
Reeves has a massive scar on his abdomen from when he suffered a ruptured spleen in a motorcycle crash while riding in L.A.'s Topanga Canyon in 1988. He went into a hairpin turn going about 50 miles per hour.
"I call that a demon ride," he reflected to Rolling Stone. "That's when things are going badly. But there's other times when you go fast, or too fast, out of exhilaration...I remember saying in my head, 'I'm going to die.'"
"I remember calling out for help," he continued. "And someone answering out of the darkness, and then the flashing lights of an ambulance coming down. This was after a truck ran over my helmet. I took it off because I couldn't breathe, and a truck came down. I got out of the way, and it ran over my helmet."
Also while his star was on the rise, his sister Kim battled cancer for years starting in the late '80s. "He helped me through," she told Vanity Fair about her brother. "When the pain got bad, he used to hold my hand and keep the bad man from making me dance. He was there all the time, even when he was away."
Actor and Dogstar bandmate Roger Mailhouse told Rolling Stone about Reeves in 2000, "He's a really giving person. He'd give you his last shoe. Really smart, too. He's incredibly booksmart. He's a really interesting person who doesn't talk a lot of s--t."
Asked how his friend had changed over the past decade, i.e. the '90s, Mailhouse said, "I don't worry about him as much. I used to worry about him. Because I think of him as one of my best friends in the world, was he going to crash his motorcycle, or this or that. We did some wild things. I guess it's just growing up. I don't know—maybe it had something to do with River Phoenix, maybe. Losing someone close to him. But now I'm just proud of him. He's getting to do it the right way."
For years you'd be much more likely to see Kim or Patricia on Reeves' arm at a premiere or other big event—such as when he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005—than any girlfriend.
As tends to be the case, he was linked to a bevy of his co-stars, including Sandra Bullock and Charlize Theron, but if at any time he was in a relationship (other than his current one with Grant) it wasn't with a fellow Hollywood celebrity.
On The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2013 he was wearing what could have been mistaken for a wedding band on his left ring finger, but no revelations ever sprang from that accessory choice.
When Parade asked in 2019 if he remained a bachelor, Reeves replied (squirming a bit, according to the magazine), "Well, I'm not married."
It's all clear now, of course.
A theme running through numerous interviews he's given over the years was the visible discomfort he started to evince when the conversation veered toward the too-personal. And some topics were just off-limits altogether.
Reeves started dating actress Jennifer Syme after meeting her at a party in 1998 and they were expecting a baby together—but the child, a girl they named Ava, was stillborn at 8 months. They laid her to rest in January 2000, according to People, and broke up weeks later.
They remained close until Syme, who suffered from severe postpartum depression, died in 2001 after she crashed her Jeep Cherokee into several parked cars on a Los Angeles street and was thrown from the vehicle. Reeves was a pallbearer at her funeral.
In 2002, her mother, Maria St. John, sued Marilyn Manson, who had thrown a party that Syme attended that night, for wrongful death, alleging he had given Syme the cocaine that an autopsy found in her system. They reportedly reached a settlement out of court, but Manson maintained he had nothing to do with Syme taking drugs that night.
Reeves has never spoken publicly about his relationship with Syme, which certainly fits right into how he was before, let alone since. But he grieved. And he eventually had plenty to say about that.
"I think, after loss, life requires an act of reclaiming," he told Parade in 2006. "You have to reject being overwhelmed. Life has to go on."
The actor continued, "Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, 'It's gone, and I'm better.' They're wrong. When the people you love are gone, you're alone. I miss being a part of their lives and them being part of mine. I wonder what the present would be like if they were here—what we might have done together. I miss all the great things that will never be."
Calling it "unfair" and "absurd," Reeves told Parade, "All you can do is hope that grief will be transformed and, instead of feeling pain and confusion, you will be together again in memory, that there will be solace and pleasure there, not just loss."
"Much of my appreciation of life has come through loss," he concluded. "Life is precious. It's worthwhile."
He said at the time that he would like to have a family, and reiterated the sentiment a couple years later, but Reeves told Esquire in 2017 with regards to settling down in that way: "I'm too… it's too late. It's over." Asked to clarify, he added, "I'm 52. I'm not going to have any kids."
Famous last words from a litany of 50-something men, and he was reminded of that. Reeves just said, "That's a whole other… But no. I'm glad to still be here."
"I'm every cliché," he continued. "F--king mortality. Aging. I'm just starting to get better at it. Just the amount of stuff you have to do before you're dead. I'm all of the clichés, and it's embarrassing. It's all of them. It's just, 'Oh my God. OK. Where did the time go? How come things are changing? How much time do I have left? What didn't I do?' I'm trying to think of the line from the sonnet… 'And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er / The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan / Which I new pay as if not paid before.'"
"So, yeah," the Shakespeare enthusiast added, reportedly with a smile. "I'm that guy."
In turn, Reeves can't help but come off as the solitary figure he so often plays in his films, from Constantine to The Matrix to John Wick. Heck, even Duke Caboom was a little melancholy.
At the same time, you can find him in a romantic tear-jerker or a quirky comedy as easily as in a shoot-em-up. He's played heroes and hustlers, sweethearts and cruel villains, teachers and slackers, doctors and lawyers.
"For me, it's just continuing to be able to work with great artists and tell stories that people enjoy," Reeves told Parade. "I was always hoping, even when I was young, that I could do different things," he says. "I'm really grateful for that. I'm very fortunate. I'm glad to be here."
(Originally published May 17, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT)