Keanu Connection

Kim and Keanu in Hawaii.

It was a season of many happiness in the movie set, where Keanu felt among friends, that we discovered that Keanu faced one more battle in his turbulent personal life. Kim, his newer sister, that was already struggling against an aggressive type of leukemia and it was in redemption there are some years, it had presented symptoms of the disease again. In December 2002, Keanu would leave the set of The Matrix to take her to Hawaii, keeping her in absolute luxury.

And now came The Matrix sequel. Indeed, two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions having been filmed back to back. Having given up a payment of around $38 million to get the movies made (one battle sequence alone cost $40 million), Keanu returned as Neo, now with only 72 hours to prevent 250,000 probes from discovering Zion and destroying the last human city. Both released in 2003, the Matrix movies would be enormo-hits, even by Reeves extraordinary standards. And now his decision to take a percentage cut instead of an upfront fee really paid off. Conservative estimates claimed he made at least $206 million from the Matrix trilogy, maybe as much as $330 million. At this point, he was the highest-paid actor in the world. The highest-paid and one of the most generous, gave away more than $US80 million to effects and costume designers who worked on the The Matrix movies. Asked about his prodigious act of generosity, the actor said he already had enough cash. “Money is the last thing I think about. I could live on what I have already made for the next few centuries”. Keanu is well known for his generosity. While filming the sequels in Australia, he surprised 12 stuntmen by giving them Harley-Davidson motorbikes.

Something’s Gotta Give, Thumbsucker and Constantine

Following Matrix 2 and 3, he ended 2003 in a very different movie, Something’s Gotta Give. This saw Jack Nicholson as an aging music biz Lothario who’s dating a far younger Amanda Peet. She takes him for a romantic weekend at the Hamptons home of her playwright mother Diane Keaton, only to find mum’s actually there. Nicholson has a long-overdue heart attack and is rushed to hospital, where he’s seen by straight-laced and caring doctor Keanu. And now the complications begin, as Reeves gets the hots for Keaton, who in turn begins to fall for the now-vulnerable Nicholson. Usually, it’s easy to see why women would fall for Nicholson, but this time, with Keanu so moral, so charming, so gallant, the competition would be stiff in more ways than one.

Having begun a relationship with actress Autumn Macintosh (rekindling the sparks of a brief fling in the early Nineties), Keanu reappeared on our screens in 2005 in two wildly varying productions. First came Thumbsucker, a resolutely indie piece featuring a teenager who, as the title suggests, still sucks his thumb.

A world away from cultdom would be the blockbuster Constantine, which would see Reeves remain with Tilda Swinton and also reunite with Rachel Weisz for the first time since Chain Reaction. Based on the comic book Hellblazer, this would see Keanu as the chain-smoking, depressive supernatural detective John Constantine, a man who can see the angels and demons who walk among us. Reeves, familiar with this territory after the Matrix, made Constantine deliberately, manically morose, as befitted a man in his position, and it was perhaps the film’s darkness that prevented it becoming the mega-hit its $100 million budget demanded.

Still in 2004, Keanu join in another surprising project: the movie A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater, based on the master’s of the fiction book, Phillip K. Dick. Keanu also reunite with Winona Ryder after 12 years. Scanner narrates the drugs experience of policeman Fred that, addicted in the "D" substance, the higher drug of that time, develops two personalities and is not aware that he dealer he seeks, Bob Arctor, is himself. The filming of this movie was completed in 23 days; the animation process took 18 months.