Keanu Reeves: ‘God bless democracy!’

He’s played an exorcist, hacker and assassin – now the John Wick star is teaming up with a muscly Marxist for an excellent new adventure

In a room where the sun does not enter, Keanu Reeves and China Miéville are having a disagreement. The star of John Wick and The Matrix and the award-winning British writer of speculative fiction have just collaborated on a novel, The Book of Elsewhere, written by Miéville and based on BRZRKR, the bestselling comic book series that Reeves began (with co-writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney) in 2021. It’s the story of an 80,000 year-old being, born to be a ­“weapon”, who can’t die, how­ever many times he is killed. Where the comic is a blood-soaked thing of beauty, the novel is a daredevil plunge into the meaning of existence that excavates alternative histories of human civilisation. I’ve just asked Reeves if he shares Miéville’s stated distaste for escapist fantasy – and Miéville, if he still has it in for Tolkien.
“This is a call back to something I said about 25 years ago, when I was a very snotty young punk,” Miéville, 52, explains to his A-list pal. “I still stand by it. I never enjoyed the sense of consolatory fantasy, but I am not the cops. People should read whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. I like something of a texture of realism and social traction within ­fiction. I was never a Tolkien fan.”
“I liked me, what was a good one… Strider, Aragorn,” Reeves protests, casually. “I mean, come on. And I kinda liked Gandalf the Grey… Did I get on board with Bilbo Baggins? Not really… But I like me a good, you know, elf.”
This last line is delivered so perfectly with what used to be called the “Keanu-ness” of Keanu Reeves that it’s hard not to smile. The 60-year-old has been a movie star for three and a half decades, ever since Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), and has a gift for the laconic, zen-like utterance. He treats any direct question as if it were an arrow that must be bent out of shape before it is handed back to you with a knot tied in it. Miéville, on the other hand, takes a deep breath before he revs into an answer (and, in an anime, Miéville inhaling deeply would be the sound of a sword being drawn).
Take this. I’ve pitched the provocation about the relationship between fictional and real-life violence, the one that had Quentin Tarantino in a 2013 TV interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy saying: “I refuse your question… I’m shutting your butt down.” In BRZRKR, the main character, Unute (who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Reeves), can be found using a ripped-off arm as a club and a freshly harvested rib as a stabbing weapon. “We’re not doing snuff movies,” Reeves groans. “And even then… Do we consider what kind of violence when we open it up? Do we talk about the violence in BRZRKR – which is like, a suicide bombing or a grief or fighting for your life? I mean, that’s a big, open word, violence. Is it emotional violence or fetishised violence? When does it become bad?” Besides, he notes, there is sweetness there, too. “And friendships, and devotion.”
Miéville (deep breath): “Let me try and be as terse as possible,” he says, noting that he understands why those who don’t enjoy ­reading or watching violent ­cartoons or movies find it so unsavoury. “My mother was horrified by some of the horror comics that I was reading when I was nine, and was very concerned.
“That said, it’s so patently, self-evidently absurd… so obviously the case that there is no direct one-to-one relationship between enjoying playful, pulpy, exaggerated cultural depictions of violence and actually being a violent person, that this whole thing feels to me like a bad faith debate.”
It’s very interesting, he adds, “that human beings are fascinated by violence”. But the discussion around it “is riddled with a kind of elitism and smear: ‘These kids play these video games. Oh, how terrible. Yes, absolutely, we must invade that country.’ I mean, f— off!”
Miéville is an intensely political person, who stood unsuccessfully for parliament for the Socialist Alliance in London in 2001, and is one of the founding editors of the avant-garde Marxist journal Salvage, through which he has proposed a form of communism as the only solution to “capitalism’s death drive”. Reeves tends not to get involved in politics. When I ask how he’s feeling about the US election, he responds, “God bless democracy” – to which Miéville says, “I can’t wait to see the beginning of democracy in America”.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Reeves continues. “And I think it’s really great – illusion or not – that people can cast a ballot… I’m just glad there’s an election and people get to make some kind of choice.”
How does he feel about the alt-right adopting the “red pill” symbolism of The Matrix? In the films, his character, Neo, is offered the choice of taking a blue pill that allows him to return to the constructed world of The Matrix or a red pill, where he’ll discover “how deep the rabbit hole goes”? “Can I just say, whatever,” he replies. “In terms of any kind of political organisation adopting something, taking a token and conflating it [with an idea]. I don’t know, man, go with God.”
“It’s a cliché, but you don’t own a text after you’ve put it out in the world,” adds Miéville. “There are plenty of outright fascists who adore Tolkien and see it as essentially a manifesto. That’s not ­Tolkien’s fault.”
They’re an odd couple but, elves and elections aside, a united front: Miéville, shaven-headed, movie-star muscled, with tattooed bluebottles crawling up one arm and kraken’s tentacles waving down the other; Reeves, slender, looser, in a pale brown suit and hiking boots, more cool lit professor than Hollywood icon. Were there any points in the creation of The Book of Elsewhere where their visions diverged? “I wouldn’t say [there was] creative discord,” Miéville says, “but there were certainly points where Keanu kind of came in with suggestions that changed it quite a lot. And I think made it much stronger.”
“I just said, you know, simply [keep] the main characters, some biography and some of the past history and stuff,” Reeves explains. “But then I was like, do whatever you want. And then he was like, so what do you think about pigs?”
“I like pigs,” Reeves replied.
And so Miéville introduced another immortal character, a babirusa, or Indonesian deer pig, subject to the same blue flashes of murderous frenzy as Unute, but trapped in an endless quest to find and kill him. It’s just one of the elements that makes the book weirder than its origin story. This is not surprising; ever since Miéville’s 867-page Perdido Street Station (2000), a dark fantasy novel set in the fictional city of New Crobuzon, the author has been associated with the “New Weird” movement in fiction.
Reeves was introduced to Miéville’s work when it was recommended to him seven or eight years ago; he read the short story collection Three Moments of an Explosion (2015). “I thought it was incredible, some of the best stories and writing I’d ever experienced. I reached out because I wanted to get the rights to “The ­Dowager of Bees”. That was first contact…”
This contact was limited to “my signature on the same piece of paper as Keanu’s signature”, Miéville points out. But a few years down the road, Reeves ­continues, the opportunity to do a novelisation of BRZRKR came up, “and my first choice was China, and then I guess…” – he settles on the right expression “… you were reached out to”.
He turns to Miéville as he says it. They both do this often, to confer or discuss, while gesturing with two hands; side on, they look like practitioners of some strange new martial art. “We happened to be in the same city when I got the email,” Miéville says. So they met, in Berlin. “There was a real serendipity to it.”
After they talked, and following a six-month pause in which he finished a long-gestated novel, Miéville began a new work based on the characters and set-up of BRZRKR. It’s not set in the same “universe”, he stresses. “These are different takes on the same character.” Indeed, comic and novel take quite different narrative directions… “And because we worked very closely at the original planning stage, there weren’t any, like, nasty surprises,” Miéville adds.
One thing the books share is a pervasive melancholy that Unute carries within him. It chimes with the idea that Reeves’s movie career since The Matrix is united by this same melancholy. Is it within him, too? “I have a taste for the melancholic, I’m not very histrionic, but I do enjoy a good melancholia,” he says. “When I think of some of the poets, Rilke or E E Cummings, I feel like there’s a melancholy [that’s] not disappointment, but it’s a yearning.”
Sigmund Freud makes an appearance in both works, analysing Unute as a patient. I note that an analyst might perhaps see the character as Reeves’s unconscious projection of himself, forced to live in cinematic eternity as the killer John Wick from the unstoppable film franchise. “You describe John Wick as a killer and an assassin. I also think of John Wick as a widower and someone who’s trapped in circumstances that he has no control over,” Reeves notes. There’s a duality to both John and Unute, who has been working with the US military, he says. “There is a death drive and he is cursed with violence, but he is also the boy who asks, ‘What am I? How am I being used? Why are you using me?’”
Did the writing make them rethink their relationship to death or dying? “For me death was already a very big [thing],” Miéville says. “I’ve seen loved ones die. I’m over 50, like, death looms, and that’s as it should be.”
Reeves has previously suggested he thinks about death “all the time”. Since 2018 he has reportedly been in a relationship with the American visual artist Alexandra Grant but he, too, has lost loved ones. His close friend River Phoenix, with whom he played a street hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991), died from a drugs overdose in 1993. In December 1999, his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Syme, was eight months pregnant with their daughter when she had a stillbirth; 16 months later, Syme was killed in a car crash. In 2019, Reeves ruefully told a ­podcast that he was good at working, but “not good at life”. Famously, a snapped photo of him contemp­latively eating a ­sandwich on a public bench spawned an internet meme known as “Sad Keanu”. The comic book opens with a ­similar image of Unute deep in thought on a bench in the rain. This is not, Reeves says, “a meta reaction to a meme that was actually a photograph by paparazzi intrudin­g in my life”.
We talk about the snobbery that still surrounds notions of low art and high art and the perceived relative value of the two – as when comparing what, Reeves asks, “a tattoo to a painting?” I suggest the way that, for instance, action films go unrecognised at the Academy Awards. Should there be an Oscar for best stunt work? “Best action design, best action sequence, yeah, that’d be cool,” he says. “I know a lot of people are trying to have that happen, and it’s certainly one of the backbones, one of the bones in the body of cinema, action design, so it’d be cool if it was represented.”
Does he share the concerns of many in the film industry about AI? He’s curious about how the technology develops, he says, but “I figure there’s something in there about devaluing the human”.
Miéville says he’s less concerned about the technology, than by the political economy behind the technology. “The question is, who is wielding it, for what end, and who is making money out of that? AI itself could be absolutely wonderful.”
BRZRKR will be adapted into a live-action Netflix film (starring Reeves), which may involve another take on the character. “The script is going to be ­influenced by the comic book, but not be the comic book,” Reeves says. “And we might do an anime and, I don’t know – a cooking show? ‘Today, we’re going to [try] the seeds of Mesopotamia, these ancient apples…’”
The Book of Elsewhere, by China Miéville and Keanu Reeves (Del Rey, £22) is out now