‘Miscast’: Keanu Reeves has faced savage criticism throughout his lengthy career
Throughout his career, the Hollywood icon has faced increasingly tough criticism for his understated film and often unappreciated work, but is it deserved?
Is Keanu Reeves the worst performer of all time?
Rosie O’Donnell certainly seems to think so. The former talk show host made headlines during her recent visit to Australia, when she declared Reeves a terrible interviewee.
“He’s so sweet, he looks gorgeous, I love all his movies but he will not answer a question,” O’Donnell told Sam Pang when she appeared as a guest on his show in October. “I finally said after three minutes, ‘Keanu, this is a talk show. You have to talk!’”
The straight-shooting comic and one-time best pal of Madonna is not the first person to throw the Speed star under the bus for his performances.
Throughout his career, Reeves has faced criticism for his understated film work. Despite iconic roles in films such as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Point Break, The Matrix and John Wick, the Canadian star has been named among the Top 10 worst actors in Hollywood alongside the likes of Paris Hilton, Steven Seagal and Adam Sandler.
MORE:Inside Keanu Reeves’ wild rise to fame amid tragedy
The most savage reviews came after he played Winona Ryder’s love interest in Francis Ford Coppola’s gloriously camp 1992 adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sharing the screen with heavyweights Sir Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman, Reeves was labelled wooden, ridiculous and woefully miscast as the British lawyer Jonathan Harker.
Responding to the critical savaging of his leading man, Coppola told Entertainment Weekly that perfectionism rather than lack of skill had been Reeves’s undoing.
“We knew that it was tough for him to affect an English accent,” Coppola reflected in the interview. “He tried so hard. That was the problem, actually – he wanted to do it perfectly, and in trying to do it perfectly, it came off as stilted. I tried to get him to just relax with it and not do it so fastidiously. So maybe I wasn’t as critical of him, but that’s because I like him personally so much. To this day, he’s a prince in my eyes.”
In the Tubi documentary Keanu Reeves: The One And Only, film historian Mark Clancy blames the harsh reviews on snobbery. And while Reeves’s laid-back style may not win him critical acclaim, according to Clancy it is what endears him to the public.
“Audiences have always enjoyed seeing what Keanu Reeves does off screen because he’s not doing the normal Hollywood things,” Clancy enthuses in the doco.
“He comes across as a genuine, laid-back person who has a life quite separate from his star power and his incredible earnings.
“He must be one of the best paid actors in Hollywood, but he seems like someone who just likes riding around on his motorcycle.”
In honour of his sister Kim – who he helped nurse through leukaemia – Reeves has donated a substantial portion of his earnings to cancer research throughout his career. And his generosity doesn’t end there.
“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,” Reeves told Ladies Home Journal in 2009.
“I don’t like to attach my name to it, I just let the foundation do what it does.”
Over the years there have been countless stories (and videos) about smaller acts of service from the screen star, such as the time he gave up his seat to a woman on the New York subway, or regaled his fellow stranded passengers on a long bus ride to LA after their flight was cancelled.
Now happily loved up with artist Alexandra Grant, Reeves is also getting rave reviews for his role in Good Fortune – in which he returns to his comedic roots and leans into his nice-guy persona.
First time director Aziz Ansari told the Hollywood Reporter at the film’s premiere: “He has a reputation of being such a sweet, kind of almost angelic figure and he also has this wisdom. If someone told you, ‘Hey, you know Keanu’s like 3000 years old,’ you’d be like, ‘That kind of tracks,’ He has this depth to him”.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is streaming on Tubi, as is Keanu Reeves: The One And Only.
Originally published as ‘Miscast’: Keanu Reeves has faced savage criticism throughout his lengthy career
