Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are as Bill and Ted like as we hoped

With strange things afoot, Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan resurrect their elastic wit and dogged determination to help save 2020.

Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving as Bill and Ted's daughters in Bill and Ted Face the Music starring Keanue Reeves and Alex Winter

With Bill and Ted, there is always joy; for us and for them. Thirty years on, that much hasn’t changed. For Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, a reunion of these characters — getting the band back together and going on the road, or through time, or whatever — wasn’t something they were necessarily hanging out for.

But they’re back, 30 years after their characters made their movie debut in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And they’re ready to give their most earnest consideration to what all this means.

In the harsh glare of a Zoom interview, Reeves and Winter are as obliging, positive and Bill-and-Ted-like as you could hope for. Back in 1989, Bill S. Preston Esquire (Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Reeves) were at a crossroads. High school students and best friends, they were about to flunk history, which would mean separation, and the demise of their band-in-progress, Wyld Stallyns. Ted’s dad was threatening to send him to military school — military school in Alaska, no less — unless he passed the final exam.

Bill and Ted's daughters (played by Brigette Lundy-Paine, left, and Samara Weaving) recruit a backup band for the dads which includes Kid Cudi (centre).

But fate had other plans. Bill and Ted, it turned out, were figures of destiny. In The Matrix, in 1999, Reeves played the One who would save us; 10 years earlier, he was half of the Two. The future of the world — in the screenplay by Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, who created the original characters — depended on Bill and Ted’s continuing friendship and musical partnership. With the help of a time-travelling phone booth and guidance from Rufus (George Carlin), their guardian from the future, Bill and Ted retrieved figures from history, passed their exam and were launched on a musical career that seemed to be all that had been forecast for them. In the 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, they survived an attempt from the future to destroy them.

Now, it’s a different story. In Solomon and Matheson’s screenplay for Bill & Ted Face the Music, “they’ve lived life, you know”, says Reeves of the characters. But they don’t seem to have lived up to what he describes as “the pressure of this destiny that they were given and responsibility of uniting the world through music”. It hasn’t worked out, and the film embraces this sense of missed opportunity.

Bringing these much-loved characters into the world of 2020, says Reeves, wasn’t about nostalgic re-creation. “It was about facing the music and being in the moment”, and about what they might have become. What Bill and Ted always had going for them, apart from their designated roles as saviours of the future and reality as we know it, was an unmistakeable sweetness — earnest, good-natured generosity, tangible optimism. Sweetness with purpose.

They might seem uncomplicated souls, with their catchphrases and trademark gestures, but there was also an elasticity to their wit, a poetic ambition to their language, as well as a dogged determination to find a solution and look for a possibility, no matter how dire the circumstances.

But could these characters be otherwise? Bogus Journey introduced us to Evil Bill and Ted robots, created in the future and sent back to kill the originals.

Our heroes died, they went to hell and back, and emerged to form a band that once again engaged with history and possibility, and also included the Grim Reaper (William Sadler) on bass.

This time we see, fleetingly, what Bill and Ted might have become. Not their fantasy android evil opposites, but people touched by success or disappointment or bad choices. That was the point. To bring them back, decades on, Reeves says, was to “be present so that we feel the weight of these guys, you know, as well as their joy and their lightness and their spirit”.

Solomon and Matheson, Winter says, “gave us a lot of meat on the bone. We get to play ourselves as so many different versions of ourselves”: Bill and Ted as rock superstars with British accents, as hustlers, as bulked-up prison yard inmates. “There’s a lot of comic potential there as well as emotional potential,” Winter says.

But what really makes the difference, this time, is that Bill and Ted have heirs. Bill has a daughter, Thea (Samara Weaving), and Ted has a daughter, Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine). They both channel paternal influences but they’re also their own characters. Their music, Reeves points out, is not like Bill and Ted’s. But when disaster strikes, and action is called for, their approach is very much the same.

Alex Winter (left) and Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted Face the Music.

“We were really happy with the way Chris and Ed had written the daughters,” Winter says, “but it was really a whole different ball game when Brigette and Samara were cast.” The two embraced Billie and Thea in their own way. “It wasn’t at all just watching our movies five times and then doing ‘us’, thankfully. They created their own characters.” The torch has been passed on.

Reeves and Winter have taken different paths since Bill and Ted: Reeves’s starring roles have included films as varied as The Matrix series, My Own Private Idaho, Speed, Point Break and the John Wick franchise; Winter has directed a number of shorts, music videos, features and documentaries, including The Panama Papers and a forthcoming documentary about Frank Zappa.

They have been close friends since Bill and Ted, so they haven’t needed to make a movie together to keep in touch. But there was something about returning to these characters that they hadn’t expected, Winter says. A very simple pleasure. “I didn’t think about it that way going in, because there was so much work to do,” Winter says. “But in the first week, I found myself just playing again with Keanu and it was really fun and instinctive; suddenly something was there that I didn’t expect, that I hadn’t quite remembered. It was just back.”

Bill & Ted Face the Music opens in cinemas (except Victoria) on Thursday.