Originally published at: In his memoirs, Matthew Perry complains that Keanu Reeves didn't die | Boing Boing
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Going out on a limb here, I can live without talentless weasel Matthew Perry, like forever.
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Agreed. He’s name-dropping dead addicts to make himself look like a better actor, and it’s gross.
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With Friends like Matthew who needs enemies?
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Extremely charitably: It really feels like a very, VERY old joke. Like the kind that was popular in the 90’s and early 00’s. Believe it or not, before the Matrix reached full cultural permeation, Keanu Reeves was seen as kind of a joke of an actor. He was in Bill & Ted, Johnny Mnemonic, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. It’s possible that somebody who hasn’t acted in anything really since a sitcom that started in the 90’s ended might not have had his finger on the pulse of the current media zeitgeist when he assembled his memoirs.
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Keanu may not be the best actor, but he seems like a pretty good person. At least compared to other people in Hollywood, he seems fairly well grounded and “normal”, what ever that means.
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Don’t forget Point Break.
I too remember when Keanu was unfairly mocked as a one-dimensional joke of an actor back in the 1990s (catchphrase: “whoa!”) but it feels like the kind of jab that no one would make in 2022 unless they’d been recently decanted from a cryogenic chamber.
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Yes, Keanu Reeves may not be the most talented actor, but from all I´ve read and saw, he is one of the nicest, sweetest guys in Hollywood. It takes a special kind of dickwad to wish death onto somebody like Reeves.
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I like Keanu, but in the 90s his range and depth was pretty shallow. Not that that matters for certain kinds of films. I think he has gotten better with time.
But fair criticism in the 90s - his casting in Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a miss-cast IMO, even though I overall liked the film.
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FTFY. And no one, apparently. Enemies never made it further than the pilot. Enemies (TV Series 2006) - IMDb
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May my enemies live long so they can see me progress. - Die Antwoord
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This made me go check imdb - Nicolas Cage was responsible for (or gets credit for depending upon your view of it) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I guess I remember the movie well enough to remember it so it wasn’t awful (or I don’t remember that it was).
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Keanu Reeves was very good as Don John in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe better directors get better performances?
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Quite a lot else by that point.
But I think you buried the lede. It was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and maybe a bit of Much Ado About Nothing, that turned Reeves into a stock reference for shit acting. Two roles he was insanely unsuited for at the time. Prior to that Reeves had been a big teen heart throb. And had appeared in a bunch of arty and hit films. My own Private Idaho, The Rivers Edge, Dangerous Liaisons.
But definitely between Dracula and the Matrix he was the sort of actor even kid’s cartoons would drop a reference to as a joke.
That was Nick Cage, and it was in 2001. So post Matrix
Reeves is very good, at the things he’s very good at. He’s just real limited stylistically. He does really still, precise, unemotional performances really well. But if you stick that in the wrong thing it 100% does not work at all.
I was pleasantly surprised at how well he pulled a completely self centered asshole in Cyperpunk 2077 though. He was quite a bit more animated and there was a lot more range than we’re used to seeing from the guy.
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His type of acting is best when it comes to physicality and stunts, but straight up acting in the typical sense he’s ok at best but i do think he’s gotten better over the years. As you say though, he seems like a good dude and using the death of other actors and shitting on Keanu for the sake of selling a book is enough to make me never want to listen or watch Matthew Perry again. His career was shit anyways, glad to have confirmation that he’s a POS too.
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Keanu Reeves’ best role of all time, now or in the future, is as himself in this self-satirizing cameo from Always Be My Maybe.
Jenny: “Now I know what it’s like to be completely starstruck.”
Reeves: “The only stars that matter are the ones you look at when you dream”
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Related to that, people who have active addictions often largely stop growing emotionally while the addiction is active. Once you get sober, it’s weird, because it’s like you’re emotionally this person you were 15 or 20 years ago, but you look in the mirror and you fucking got old. So Perry may have been stuck in that mid 90s emotional state when he started writing this book, and hadn’t caught up to the fact that everyone loves Keanu because everyone figured out what a super nice guy he is. So Perry, as @Brainspore said, may have just been making a joke that probably would have been funny in 1995. That being said, I’m not a huge fan of the “look at me, I got clean and sober” victory tour/memoir promotion Perry is on right now. I’ve seen these before. They rarely end well.
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To be fair, it’s not that Keanu got better as an actor, he simply has moved into roles that fit his rather limited range. Reeves is very good at looking dumbfounded and saying empty things like “Whoa!”. Which was 90% of what was needed for Neo. And likewise for John Wick where the idea is that he rarely reacts emotionally to anything because he is a cold-hearted assassin.
Yes, from interviews Keanu seems like a nice person, but that doesn’t make him a great actor. Saying he “wanted Reeves to die” like this article and others by angry Keanu fanboys do misses the point is that Perry was comparing the short life of River Phoenix (who was probably the greatest actor of his generation) to Reeves, who just wasn’t anywhere near that. Of course it wasn’t just bad luck or fate that ended Phoenix’s life early – it was his drug problem, which if anyone Perry should have realized was the cause.
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