Reeves' own journey begins in Beirut, Lebanon, where he was born in 1964 to a British mother and Chinese-Hawaiian father. (Keanu is Polynesian for 'cool breeze over the mountains'). He spent his early childhood years in Australia and New York before his mother eventually settled in Canada after she and Keanu's father decided to split up when he was only four.
A self-confessed slacker in high school, Reeves was an avid hockey player who eventually dropped out to work at a local hockey rink. Explains Reeves: 'I wanted to be a hockey player long before I ever thought of being an actor. I was pretty shy as a child. I didn't feel confident unless I was on the ice.'
'Because I had trouble reading (he is dyslexic), I wasn't a good student. I didn't finish high school. I did a lot of pretending as a child. It was my way of coping with the fact that I didn't really feel like I fit in. But when I was 15, I started doing some acting and I got hooked because it was like hockey in that it allowed me to be somebody different... the rest of the time I was just goofing off and hanging out... But I definitely liked to party,' he smiles.
At the age of 19, Keanu loaded up his 1969 Volvo and drove to Los Angeles where he has lived ever since. His first serious film role would come in the 1987 teen alienation film, River's Edge. Later that year, he became famous as Ted, an airheaded air guitar freak who kept bellowing 'Excellent!' in Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure. The film was so well etched into the minds of people that for years Reeves had trouble living down the image of the spaced-out surfer dude.
'Ted was my goofball alter ego, but it didn't give me very much credibility as an actor....I'm still trying to erase his memory from my system,' says Reeves.
Eventually he would find a film that would tap into some of his considerable anguish, My Own Private Idaho, the highly regarded 1992 Gus Van Sant film co-starring Reeves' best friend River Phoenix in which they played street hustlers.
'I still look at that film as one of the greatest projects I've ever been involved with,' muses Reeves. 'There was such a beautiful intensity to the work and I was pushed to go psychological places I was much too afraid to explore on my own... I gained a lot of confidence from going through that experience and learned that if you're going to want to achieve anything as an actor, you have to be willing to face down your fears and stare into your soul.'
Phoenix's subsequent death of a drug overdose outside Johnny Depp's Viper Club in LA served as something of a warning to Reeves that his own drinking wasn't doing him any good, and he began to change his outlook and take his career more responsibly after Speed turned him into a box-office star.
'For an actor, movies are a way of distancing yourself from life and in the past I've tended to let my work allow me to pull a disappearing act from all the worries I have. That way I didn't have to ask the usual questions about what I wanted from life.'
'Acting allows you to escape all that, and fortunately or unfortunately, I'm not able to accept that suspension of reality for very long. There's always something that draws me back. Sometimes I'm only happy when I can walk down a street late at night and sit by myself at some empty diner. That's where my head feels free and I can just sit back and smoke a cigarette and look out the window.'
In the meantime, Reeves has been undergoing an ordeal of an entirely different nature. In the past few years, his sister Kim's battle against leumkemia has grown more serious, and he financed the cost of building an additional wing to the hospital she was in. He's also famous for giving large amounts of money to his close friends and buying expensive bottles of wine for fellow cast members. In addition, the death of a former girlfriend in a car crash three years ago was also a sobering experience.
'Life teaches you to value things which are truly meaningful and you begin to stop wasting so much time worrying about useless questions that just deflect you from where you want to go and who you want to be,' he reflects. 'I feel much more open and present as a human being and I'm also less anguished in general. I guess I've reached a stage in my life where I've been able to find some clarity and certainty and peace of mind in that.'
'I don't feel as much of a loner as I used to feel like, but I still need to spend time by myself and away from all the shit that accumulates in your life. Those are the moments you feel the freest.'
Copyright © 2005 FEATSPRESS
