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    Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to Star in ‘Waiting for Godot’ on Broadway

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    They played slacker buddies in three “Bill & Ted” films, and next year they plan to reunite for Beckett’s classic tragicomedy.Call it Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure.Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, the actors who incarnated a pair of slacker musicians for three “Bill & Ted” films, are planning to reunite for a Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot.”The production, planned for the fall of 2025, will be directed by Jamie Lloyd, one of the hottest directors of the moment, whose work is characterized by a spare aesthetic and an emphasis on psychological intensity.Lloyd said that the project was Reeves’s idea, but that as soon as the actor approached him, “it was a no-brainer that this needed to be done.”“Their instant chemistry and their shorthand and their friendship is going to be so valuable,” Lloyd said of Reeves and Winter in an interview. “This is a very deeply complex play, as we all know, but it’s also a very funny play, and they’re very witty people and their shared sense of humor in those movies and in real life is going to be very beneficial to the production.”In “Godot,” Reeves will play Estragon and Winter will play Vladimir, who banter and bicker while waiting for a mysterious figure who never arrives. “Those characters take solace in their companionship as they stumble toward the void,” Lloyd said, adding, “that’s going to be the central thesis of the production, with Keanu and Alex’s own friendship.”“Waiting for Godot,” by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, was first staged in French in 1953 and then in English in 1955. The play was first performed on Broadway in 1956, and has been revived there three times since, most recently in 2013 with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.Reeves, the prolific film star of the “Matrix” and “John Wick” series, will be making his Broadway debut with “Godot.” He likes a challenge: In 1995, he played Hamlet in Winnipeg, Manitoba.Winter, who writes and directs in addition to acting, appeared on Broadway twice in the 1970s, when he was a teenager, in musical revivals of “The King and I” and “Peter Pan.”The two first worked together in 1989 in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A second film, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” arrived in 1991, and a third, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” in 2020.Lloyd, based in London, has become a regular presence in New York. Last year he directed a revival of “A Doll’s House” starring Jessica Chastain, and this fall he will direct a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” starring Nicole Scherzinger.The “Waiting for Godot” revival is being produced by Lloyd’s production company, as well as ATG Productions, Bad Robot Live (J.J. Abrams’s company) and Gavin Kalin Productions. ATG is a British theater company that has a long relationship with Lloyd and operates seven Broadway theaters; the production said that “Godot” would be staged in one of those ATG theaters. More

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      Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.

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      Keanu Reeves doesn’t know exactly where the idea came from, but one day — sometime around the release of “John Wick: Chapter 2,” starring Keanu Reeves, and before he started shooting “The Matrix Resurrections,” also starring Keanu Reeves — he imagined a man who couldn’t die.“It became a series of what ifs,” he said. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”From there, Reeves added, “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”For a while, the character only existed in Reeves’s head. Then he wondered, What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?“And then, there’s another what-if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”Reeves’s ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise. The comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spinoff are in development at Netflix. More

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      Hollywood Actors Are Leaping Into Video Games

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      Onscreen stars have increasingly been going virtual. Jodie Comer and David Harbour are making their video game debuts in a remake of the 1992 horror game Alone in the Dark.A stream of actors who built their careers in Hollywood are making their digital presence felt in video games, a once stigmatized medium that is increasingly seen as a unique storytelling platform with the ability to reach large audiences.Some are voice acting, transferring skills they may have honed in animated movies or TV shows, while others are contributing their likenesses through advanced motion-capture technology that can replicate furrowed brows and crinkled cheeks.Last year, Cameron Monaghan led Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Megan Fox portrayed a character in Mortal Kombat 1, and Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves provided the backbone of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.In this month’s remake of the 1992 horror game Alone in the Dark, both Jodie Comer, who won an Emmy for “Killing Eve” and a Tony for “Prima Facie,” and David Harbour, known for his work on “Stranger Things,” are making their video game debuts. They are among the group of actors meeting younger generations where they already are.“I hope that people are still watching two-hour movies decades from now, but I know they will be playing video games,” Harbour said in an email.In a behind-the-scenes video by the game’s publisher, Comer said that working on the movie “Free Guy,” set in a fictionalized video game, gave her a newfound appreciation of the industry. “It’s so incredible to be able to kind of step out of what you usually do and explore something new, and kind of challenge yourself,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Wick Sure Has a Lot of Friends for a Lone Assassin

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      How does a taciturn solo killer have so many pals? The films’ creators can’t really explain, but each character has a raison d’être in this world.Over a run of three stunt-laden films, John Wick has dispatched his enemies with rifles, pistols, swords and knives, as well as an assortment of things that just happen to be nearby. On one occasion, he took out several foes by slamming into them with his ’69 Ford Mustang; on another, he beat a man to death with a library book. And then there was that time Wick slaughtered three men in a bar with a pencil, a feat that his fellow killers can’t seem to stop talking about. Wherever Wick goes, folks die.So why does John Wick, that most lethal of assassins, have so many friends?In a clear break from the tradition of cinematic lone-wolf assassins with few if any pals — Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name; Chow Yun-fat in a series of John Woo films — Wick seems to have dozens. Everybody knows him, from beat cops and mechanics to club bouncers and hotel concierges.“Wick has so many friends in this world because, at the end of the day, he’s inherently a good man,” the screenwriter Michael Finch explained. “And he’s Keanu, so it’s very hard to dislike him.”That would be Keanu Reeves, who has played the franchise’s titular hero since the first Wick film in 2014. Now considered one of the greatest action films ever made, “John Wick” started a nearly $600 million franchise that has been praised for its imaginatively over-the-top action sequences. And over the years, Wick’s friend circle has only grown.“John Wick: Chapter 4,” the latest installment of the series directed by Chad Stahelski, premieres Friday, and features even more of Wick’s chums. The franchise has always drawn top talent for its supporting cast, like Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne and Willem Dafoe, and this sequel is no different. Joining this time around are the martial arts film veterans Hiroyuki Sanada (“The Last Samurai,” “Ring”), playing a close friend from Wick’s distant past, and Donnie Yen (“Hero,” the “Ip Man” series), starring as a blind swordsman enlisted to kill Wick.John Wick’s universe includes Donnie Yen, center, as a blind swordsman and Scott Adkins as Killa.Murray Close/Lionsgate“We spent three movies showing how lethal John is,” the producer Basil Iwanyk said. “So we thought to ourselves, we’ve got to give him a nemesis that you believe he can’t beat.”For newcomers to the franchise, the setup is simple: Wick is a former assassin who has managed to get out of the business, only to be drawn back in by the rash actions of one very stupid guy who kills his dog, the last gift from his recently deceased wife, and steals his car. Wick comes out of retirement to murder the man, and thus our story, and the franchise, begins.Before long, we meet an ever-growing series of pals (present and former), acquaintances and longtime associates. In the first minutes of the original film, we meet Marcus, an old friend played by Dafoe. Not long after, a police officer, Jimmy (Thomas Sadoski), stops by because Wick’s neighbors are complaining that he’s been murdering people too loudly. “Evenin,’ John,” Jimmy greets him. Soon after, yet another friend, Charlie (David Patrick Kelly), comes to cart away all the corpses and mop up the blood. “Good to see you, John,” he says, doffing his cap.On a purely practical level, Wick’s many friends exist to infuse some humanity into this otherwise fearsome killer of men. “The action sequences are phenomenal,” said Caitlin G. Watt, the co-editor of “The Worlds of John Wick: The Year’s Work at the Continental Hotel,” an ambitious collection of academic essays. “But if you don’t like John Wick or sympathize with him, the movies don’t work.”The plethora of friends also provides a nod to the long and harrowing career Wick had before we first met him, including the legendary “impossible task” that allowed Wick to retire and burnished his reputation as the fearsome Baba Yaga. “Chad and Keanu created a character whose life you simply drop into,” Finch said. “You don’t know anything about what happened. We still don’t know what the impossible task was.”It’s largely through these friends that we learn about the very complex world Wick inhabits: its communication systems, rules of etiquette, international chain of deluxe hotels (the Continental, preferred lodging for the world’s most discriminating assassins), and currency. You certainly aren’t going to learn much about this through our taciturn hero, whose most impactful lines generally run only a few syllables long: “I’m going to need a gun,” for instance, or “Yeah.”To be fair, nobody wants a chatty Wick. “These action films about mythological, larger-than-life characters die when you ask your lead to be expositional,” Finch said.Watt, who has written about the franchise’s ties to Russian folklore, tales of knights in exile and the idea of the “monstrous hero,” agreed. “You don’t go to John Wick for the dialogue,” she said, adding that no one expects it “to be like a Noël Coward play. But the dialogue does a lot of work in establishing these characters, their relationships and this very strange world where all of this takes place.”As for just how many true friends Wick has: “I think there are Continentals in most major cities, so there are probably roads that lead to John wherever he goes,” the producer Erica Lee said. “I don’t think he’s the guy who has a surprise 60th birthday and there’s a room full of people. But he does have a select handful of trusted people he can call out to.”Halle Berry played — what else? — a former friend in “John Wick 3.”LionsgateBeginning with the first film, the creators pulled from their own circle of friends to cast Wick’s. Stahelski met Kelly when both were working on “The Crow,” the 1994 superhero film. “I was a new stunt guy and he was in the cast, and he took time to talk to me,” Stahelski said. “So when I needed a Charlie, he was in my head.” A similar thing happened with Randall Duk Kim, the doctor who patches up Wick’s wounds — Stahelski had worked with him on “The Matrix Reloaded.”The franchise’s Manhattan setting also played a role in casting. “We were so below the radar, just an independent movie that didn’t even have distribution,” Iwanyk said of the first film. “But we shot in New York City, and there are so many actors there. That’s how we got John Leguizamo, Bridget Moynahan, Lance Reddick,” who died March 17 at age 60 but played Charon, concierge of the New York Continental, owned by Winston (Ian McShane), in all four chapters.When the characters — and the film — hit, the creators kept many of them on for the sequels. Others soon followed. “When we were talking about ‘2,’ someone said, wouldn’t it be cool if we got Laurence Fishburne, so it would be like Neo and Morpheus?” Lee said of the actor who plays the Bowery King in three of the installments. Berry, who played Sofia Al-Azwar in “3,” asked Stahelski for a part before a script was even written.In this latest installment, friendship again plays a major role. Old friends return to protect Wick, or hunt him.But just how, when and why Wick befriended all of these people is still largely a mystery, even to the creators. For the most part, histories for the characters, even for Wick himself, were created on the fly, if at all. “We never wanted to get into John’s back story,” Iwanyk said. “You know these people have a shared experience with John, and you know it was something intense and often violent, but you don’t know what it is specifically.”Even so, the stories wouldn’t work without these characters. A John Wick movie sans friends? “I wouldn’t know how to tell that story,” Finch said. “There would not be a successful franchise without a Winston, without a Charon, without a Bowery King.”John Wick’s Friend CircleAnjelica Huston as what passes for a maternal presence in John Wick’s world.Niko Tavernise/LionsgateBeing friends with John Wick isn’t easy. Over the years, people who have helped out Wick have been sliced seven times with a sword (Laurence Fishburne); smothered and shot in the head (Clarke Peters); tortured, then killed (Willem Dafoe); and asked to resign from their places of business (Ian McShane). There are friends whom Wick has shot at (Claudia Gerini), and others who have fired on Wick (McShane, Halle Berry). There are still others who want to be pals with Wick (Shamier Anderson, Mark Dacascos), but they’ve been hired to assassinate him, which tends to sour things in Wickworld, but often not for long.With all the bullets flying, who can keep track? Here’s a quick primer to a handful of Wick’s friends.WINSTON (IAN MCSHANE) He is the owner of the New York Continental, a swanky hotel for assassins. The establishment’s primary rule: absolutely no killing on the premises. When Wick does, it puts him at odds with Winston and the High Table, the shadowy crime council that oversees the world’s Continentals. “Winston is empathetic toward John’s quest, but I think he’s always trying to guide him toward his better instincts and away from danger,” the screenwriter Shay Hatten said.CHARON (LANCE REDDICK) The trusty, resourceful concierge of the New York Continental, Charon gets arms and ammo for Wick, fights alongside him and even breaks hotel rules by taking care of his (second) dog when the assassin is away. Even so, Charon doesn’t seem all that broken up when Winston shoots Wick in the chest at the end of the third installment. “Charon is an inherently decent man,” Finch said. “But even the nicest guy in the series has an edge to him.”THE DOCTOR (RANDALL DUK KIM) Called upon to patch up Wick’s wounds, the Doctor takes a bullet for Wick — two, in fact, from Wick’s own gun, to cover up the fact that he is helping Wick against the direct rules of the High Table. “We excuse a lot of what John does because people like the Doctor, who are inherently OK and decent, seem to respond positively to him,” Finch said.THE DIRECTOR (ANJELICA HUSTON) The leader of the Ruska Roma, another crime organization, the Director was a maternal figure to the orphan Wick. For helping him escape punishment in “3,” the Director’s hands are ritually skewered by the High Table. “I wouldn’t call them friends, at this point,” Lee said. “I think she’s probably annoyed at John.”THE BOWERY KING (LAURENCE FISHBURNE) As the self-anointed sovereign over a network of seeming panhandlers and vagrants who act as his eyes and ears, the Bowery King is an invaluable source of intel for Wick, as well as a major supplier for Wick’s other needs. “The Bowery King is an anarchist,” Lee said. “So when John had to go off grid, he was there to help him get guns, supplies and bulletproof suits.” More

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      Keanu Reeves Will Be Your Mirror

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      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicHe’s an unknowable icon, the internet’s adorably tragic boyfriend, a prolific actor who never seems to be acting. Wesley Morris wants to get to the bottom of Keanu Reeves — and to understand “why we get so much out of a movie star who appears to give us so little.”He turns to Alex Pappademas — the writer, podcast host and author of “Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon” — to try to solve this mystery.Keanu has had a three-decade acting career, through which he is arguably just playing different versions of himself. And he is conscious of his audience knowing this: “He knows that we’re there, and he wonders if we’ve figured out that it’s just Keanu Reeves once again playing a character,” says Alex.Wesley and Alex discuss the most memorable examples of Keanu being Keanu (including the time he literally played himself) — and why we are seeing ourselves whenever we look at the actor.Keanu Reeves.Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionHosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More

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      ‘The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run’ Review: Still Square

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run’ Review: Still SquareThis new franchise installment, “Sponge on the Run,” wants to be clever in nodding toward genre conventions. But its execution is poor.SpongeBob (voiced by Tom Kenny) in “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run.”Credit…Paramount AnimationMarch 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the RunDirected by Tim HillAnimation, Adventure, Comedy, FamilyPG1h 31mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.I’m no stranger to Bikini Bottom. I may not have a pineapple home there, but I know the residents and local spots. Though after my unfortunate recent visit, for “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run,” I’m packing up my swim trunks and heading elsewhere.In “Sponge on the Run,” directed by Tim Hill, our favorite undersea fry cook must journey with his best friend, Patrick, to rescue SpongeBob’s pet snail, Gary, who has been snail-napped by King Poseidon. They’re headed to the Lost City of Atlantic City, a “scary, vice-ridden cesspool of moral depravity” (sorry, Jersey, you didn’t hear it from me).[embedded content]“Sponge on the Run” wants to be clever in nodding toward genre conventions: Patrick suggests they’re on a buddy adventure while SpongeBob thinks he’s on a singular hero’s journey. It’s both — and both executed poorly. With the internet’s boyfriend, Keanu Reeves, using his celebrity clout to no avail as SpongeBob and Patrick’s spiritual guide, the duo pass through a Western saloon-style underworld inhabited by cowboy-pirate-zombies dancing to Snoop Dogg. If that last sentence confounded you, let me just say that’s only one of the inane and illogical narrative turns in this stubbornly unfunny film. But that Snoop song? A jam. With Weezer covers and a reggaeton-style remix of the show’s theme, the movie at least knows how to drop a beat.The rest is studded with references to the first (and vastly superior) SpongeBob film, from 2004, and chokes up its third act with an endless, overly sentimental lovefest. All this rendered in C.G.I. animation so nauseatingly garish and artificial it’s like inserting LED lights directly into your eyeballs. “Sponge on the Run” may take us back under the sea, but this sponge is all dried up.The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the RunRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and on Paramount+. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Keanu Reeves Comic Book Arrives Wednesday

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKeanu Reeves Comic Book Arrives WednesdayBRZRKR, a new comic book created and co-written by the actor, has a character who looks a lot like him. It’s also receiving high orders from comic-book shops.“I’ve loved comics since I was a kid and they’ve been a significant influence artistically throughout my career,” said Keanu Reeves, the creator and co-writer of the new comic.Credit…Ron Garney/Boom! StudiosMarch 3, 2021, 10:22 a.m. ETA comic book created and co-written by the actor Keanu Reeves arrives in stores on Wednesday, with more than 615,000 copies ordered by comic book retailers. (The order is notably high: Last March, Marvel released a new Spider-Woman No. 1 that sold 142,000 copies in North America, according to Comichron.)The comic, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), is about an immortal warrior, with a look inspired by Reeves, on a quest to discover his origin and to end his long, 80,000-plus-year life.BRZRKR, from Boom! Studios, is co-written by Matt Kindt and drawn by Ron Garney. “I’ve loved comics since I was a kid and they’ve been a significant influence artistically throughout my career,” Reeves said in a video interview for Boom! posted in January. The series will run for 12 issues.Boom! had a good inkling of interest for the book last year. In September, the company ran a Kickstarter for supporters to pre-order collected editions of the comic. The campaign had a goal of $50,000 and ended at $1.45 million. The first volume is due in October. (Excellent.)AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More