Keanu Reeves had a vision. Then things got really weird

The words “celebrity collaboration” usually signify stars lending their names to garish sneakers or overpriced perfume, but this year’s most anticipated celeb alliance is an altogether different affair; no brands involved, and a decidedly more enjoyable “product”.

The internet’s favourite actor, Keanu Reeves, has teamed up with British sci-fi author China Mieville to co-write a novel, The Book of Elsewhere.

Released worldwide this week, the speculative fiction is “inspired by” the world of the BRZRKR comic books, which Reeves co-created with writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney in 2021 and quickly became the highest-selling original title of the 21st century. A live-action film (starring Reeves, of course) is planned, as well as an anime series.

But first, Reeves wanted to expand the world he had created in the story of B, an immortal demigod cursed by and compelled to extreme violence.

Keanu Reeves imagined “a character who can punch you through the chest and rip your arms off”.Credit: Brian Bowen

Reeves, who may never escape his Bill & Ted stoner dude image, and whose many acts of kindness on film sets and to fans have seen him widely referred to as “the internet’s boyfriend”, seems an unlikely fan of what he calls “hyper-violence”. But he grew up loving comics, and let’s face it, he’s portrayed his fair share of inscrutable killers. In his John Wick franchise, his protagonist racks up 415 violent kills across the four films.

The concept came to Reeves when he was filming the second John Wick film, as “a character who can punch you through the chest and rip your arms off, who was cursed with violence … trying to figure out who they are and reclaim their humanity”.

A couple of years ago, Reeves approached Mieville, a Marxist with a doctorate in international relations and an award-winning author of “weird fiction”, whose books feature intricate world building, often with a political undertone.

It seems an odd pairing, but in an announcement about the project, Mieville said it was “an honour, a shock and a delight” to be asked.

Speaking over Zoom – fittingly, Reeves, in the US, is perched on a chair in a sunny room and Mieville, in the UK, has his darkened background blurred (having got up at 4.30am, I’m just trying to look awake) – they reveal that they’d never met before the project.

“I was just a fan of (China’s) work,” says Reeves, who, of course, is lovely, and genuinely excited about the project, “and I reached out to see if he would be interested in writing a novel inspired by BRZRKR.”

BRZRKR bears a striking resemblance to Keanu Reeves in the comic’s pages.Credit: Artist Ron Garney and colourist Bill Crabtree

Mieville, whose best-known works include the Bas-Lag series, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, has always loved Reeve’s work, but had no idea that the actor was a fan of his books. “That was obviously a great surprise and great pleasure,” he says.

And just how did it work, given the pair live on different sides of the world?

“We first met in Berlin (in 2021) for the first kind of preliminary investigation,” explains Reeves. “China came very prepared and was basically, you know, ‘Does this work?’ or ‘How do you feel about this?’ I’ll let China speak to what he was thinking, but … we met a few times over the course of the novel, but generally, it wasn’t in person.”

The plot thickened as China Mieville and Keanu Reeves tossed around ideas.Credit: NYT

Mieville says they “front-loaded” a lot of their ideas when they first met, and corresponded substantially before they “pulled the trigger”.

“We wanted to make sure this was going to work,” he says. “It was really only the first draft where I wrote most of the lines myself, but by that time we had done a lot of work on the structure, the shape, and on the tone of the different threads on the characters.”

It wasn’t a question of Mieville writing something and delivering it to Reeves; the pair talked regularly, mapping out the plot, with Mieville writing drafts and editing on Reeves’ suggestions.

In the short time I spent with them, it’s clear they had a ball collaborating – later in our chat they’re even bouncing around ideas for further projects.

“I think your idea of an epic poem could certainly be perceived well,” Reeves says to Mieville. “A modern Gilgamesh!”

Mieville points out that Gilgamesh is a “whippersnapper” compared to B. But he’s down for the epic poem idea. “I’ve been angling for this for some time,” he says. “Not for me to write it, by the way – but I would love to see that.”

Born in mysterious circumstances (involving his mother’s prayers and some mystical blue lightning) around 80,000 years ago, B – whose original name in the novel is revealed as Unute (“It’s an older-sounding word,” says Reeves, “it has something ‘other’ to it; it’s exotic”) – has wandered the world for centuries; he’s seen the rise and fall of civilisations and species, he speaks ancient, long-dead languages and he’s fought in many wars.

It’s been really great that this kind of demigod alien god could, in China’s hands, be so emotional and philosophical.

Keanu Reeves

He’s been revered as a god and feared as an agent of the devil, although he believes he is neither of these things. And he’s tired; all he really wants is to be mortal, and, eventually, to die. In the present day (or near future), B has found what he thinks is a refuge, working for the US government, both as a warrior and as a specimen for them to research (they’re especially interested in his “berserks”, the frenzied states he enters during which he commits serious violence), in exchange for the US Army’s Special Forces helping him learn the truth about his existence, and how to end it.

There are moments of pulpy John Wick-esque violence both in the modern-day setting and the alternating chapters that recount B’s experiences over the millennia, some of which are told from the points of view of people he has encountered throughout history. There are mystical elements and world-shaping that will be familiar to readers of Mieville; it’s a fun, genre-bending sci-fi mash-up.

Oh, and there’s also an immortal babirusa (I had to look it up – it’s a prehistoric-looking Indonesian swine known as a “deer pig”), who has hunted B for at least 78,000 years, and who may be his closest relative.

But for an immortal defined by extreme violence, B exhibits a lot of humanity - when he’s not punching through someone’s chest cavity.

“Hopefully there’s a pathos to the character,” says Reeves, “A melancholy. It’s been really great that this kind of demigod half-human, half-other, alien god cursed with violence and being immortal, could, in China’s hands, be so provocative, and moving and emotional and philosophical about life, and love, and grief. And … searching for meaning. And yeah, the big ideas, the big thoughts!”

The book’s philosophical motifs might surprise those who underestimate Reeves, but they might also please those who enjoy the “Sad Keanu” memes that he’s destined to never escape.

China Mieville and Keanu Reeves co-wrote The Book of Elsewhere. 

It’s not a new idea, Mieville says, to use a popular genre to make serious statements.

“You don’t have to do that and it isn’t necessarily something that all readers expect,” he says. “We had all the stuff in it that was promised by the fact that it is a novel about an immortal warrior, so it has the ultra-violence, it has the helicopter chase, but we also wanted … moments of pathos and quiet and solicitude and thoughtfulness. I hope that surprises people, in a good way.”

It surprised me to find that, by the book’s end, B is ultimately defined more by his empathy than by his compulsion to barbarity.

“Yeah, certainly. I think the distinction is he doesn’t want to die,” Reeves says, “he wants to be able to die. I think by having a character like that, we can investigate how we feel about our own mortality. And also see how other people think about power.”

Having 80,000 years of history to draw on also opened up endless possibilities for anecdotes from his life/lives (B does experience death, of sorts, but every time he dies, he respawns inside an egg-like sac), and I was sent down several rabbit holes looking up the various historical cults and religious movements B encounters, such as the Jansenists (a controversial 17th-century religious movement in France whose followers essentially believed in the denial of free will).

“One of the great pleasures … was that you’ve got this vast canvas to work on,” Mieville says, “so I could pick moments from history and flesh them out. Doing something like that, it can’t be obligatory for the reader - if you’ve got a reader who really doesn’t want to bother Googling the Ranters if they don’t happen to know about them already, it won’t matter. But if you do, you get something extra out of it. So it’s always got to be an Easter egg rather than a … key to a door. I’m mixing my metaphors, but you get my point.”

Mieville relished the opportunity to dig into different historical periods; it is, he says, precisely the kind of thing he loves. “You know, I’m a middle-aged man – I’ve amassed, like a magpie, a lot of … shiny bits of history over the years and you keep them all in your notebook,” he says with a laugh. “And then you unexpectedly get an invitation to write a book with one of your favourite actors – it’s great. Everyone’s a winner!”

And everyone loves learning about a new (ancient) cult, right?

“Oh yeah,” agrees Reeves. “Cults are weird. They have a weird power, a magnetism. I really loved the multiple cult stories. And I think, this mysterious power and energy of immortality, or the source, I think it’s a shiny thing that humans have been attracted to; it’s a different bit of gold, isn’t it? This idea of immortality and power.”

Keanu Reeves as hitman John Wick.

The conversation veers slightly off-topic at this stage, but it’s not every day you get to chat cults with Keanu Reeves and China Mieville.

Mieville, whose 2010 novel Kraken features a squid-worshipping cult, says when he’s reading up on religious sects, “every so often I’ll read one and be like, ‘Oh yeah, I could totally fall for that’. It is not beyond the balance of possibility that some cult is right about some things.”

The world “cult” can also, adds Reeves, be unpacked in a lot of ways. “But the kind of classical cults that we’re revealed to in (the book) are a lot of fun.”

There are other moments of levity in The Book of Elsewhere; for a warrior who can tear men apart with his bare hands, B is surprisingly sophisticated. He’s completed more than a dozen PhDs, tried a couple of therapy sessions with Dr Sigmund Freud, and even once performed in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape.

“I think B is quite a Beckettian character,” says Mieville. “Beckett is a very funny writer – although a kind of lugubriously funny writer – and there’s a lot of humour to B in the comics and, I think, in our novel.”

Keanu Reeves on the couch with co-author China Mieville.Credit: NYT

And, as one would after wandering the earth for 80,000 years, he has lots of interests.

“He likes a good chair,” says Reeves, referring to a passage in the book about B’s house. He also prefers listening to music on vinyl; he has, let’s face it, plenty of time to get up out of his designer chair and flip an album over.

“I think that one of the cool things, one of the joys, (is) when China does that passage about when B talks about why he likes an album. It takes time, and … his relationship to time is different than ours.”

We want things faster and easier, says Reeves, “but he has all the time in the world so he likes actually going through … the process, the ritual of putting on an album.”

Perhaps, he adds, we might learn something from this immortal warrior.

“Maybe we can realise, ‘Oh right, maybe I need to slow down’. And, ‘How do I perceive things – how don’t I?’ ‘What is my taste?’ And so I, I like, how one can kind of, be enjoying a fiction and also take it home in a way, you know?”

The Book of Elsewhere is not, as some will suspect, a celebrity vanity project; both Reeves and Mieville have been involved in every aspect of the book, even geeking out over the typography for the 1970s-inspired cover. “That was fun for me,” Reeves says, “going through font talk!”

The Australian and British covers differ from the US cover, but both feature the babirusa. The US cover features a babirusa skull (“they’re creatures with the most extraordinary skull, arguably, in the animal kingdom,” says Mieville), and the Australian version features a “boy and his pig”, says Reeves, almost apologetically.

It still looks very cool, I tell him. “It is cool! We’re glad you like it because a lot of people spent time working on it,” he says, and we enter another tangent about the art of book cover design. “You might not judge a book by its cover,” Reeves says, “but it sure is part of the experience.”

They’re now at the anxious stage of the project. Reeves bounces around excitedly, feigning jitters, and Mieville says he’s always nervous before the release of a new work.

There’s been lots of online chatter about the book; Mieville hasn’t written a fiction work since 2016, and Reeves’ BRZRKR comics have already sold more than 2 million copies. I don’t think they need to worry.

The Book of Elsewhere (Penguin) is out July 23.