The Best Characters Keanu Reeves Has Ever Played

Mr. Anderson presents an interesting acting challenge. To play him from the "The Matrix" through its subsequent sequels, an actor needs to depict frustration, anger, confidence, confusion, sadness, inner peace, dissociation, and longing. But the actor also needs to keep these emotions slow, as if Neo were experiencing them through a pane of glass.

In other words, no one but Reeves could've realized the character so perfectly.

Reeves hooks into the idea that, given who Neo is, he often feels separated from his emotions even when he's unaware that he lives in a simulation. He has them still, but they always feel a bit alien, as though he's experiencing someone's feelings for them. When finally "awakened," he still often seems emotionally removed from himself. However, this reflects both the trauma of finding out the whole of existence as you know it is a lie and Neo's role in both worlds. When he's jacked in, he can see the code of the false universe. When he's outside the simulation, his life is still defined by what he must do in the program. Reeves navigates that sense of being divided without ever losing Neo's humanity.

If you need one specific role to point to as the moment public opinion changed on Reeves' acting, it almost certainly has to be John Wick. Praise and excitement certainly met characters like Neo along the way, but one could feel the earth shift when "John Wick" came out.

Like "The Matrix" films, the installments in the "Wick" series are perfectly suited to how Reeves expresses sadness. Even in his breakdowns, he is a silent sufferer, and these films capture that well. He's also a slow sufferer, which Reeves lets play across his eyes even in Wick's angriest, most vengeful moments.

The "I'm thinking I'm back" line is iconic because it is excellent — wonderfully timed, well-delivered, and smartly written. It's Wick at his most coiled dangerous. However, Reeves lets the anguish of "being back" move across the assassin's features even at that moment. It's a badass scene, for sure, but he never lets it be only that. He never lets us forget what it cost him to be this badass.

One of the genres that Reeves has arguably struggled with the most is romances. He has a slow, easy charisma, but that energy has often been misaligned in love-centric pictures. But in "The Lake House" — a high-concept romance involving letters that magically travel through time via a special box — he finds the right fit.

Certainly part of it is that he and Sandra Bullock already had a proven chemistry when they signed on for this film. What was discovered in "Speed," they brought to bear here despite existing on different points in the timeline.

While chemistry will get viewers a lot of the way there, that's not the only reason to recommend Reeves here. There's a sadness at the core of Alex that the actor captures without letting it upset the film's central preoccupation. The way Kate's (Bullock) letters reinvigorate him makes their romance so much richer because of the low ebb of depression he establishes so well in the early-going. Without it, "The Lake House" would be a cute enough film. With it, however, the picture gains an extra bit of resonance.

At one point in the 2005 dramedy "Thumbsucker," Keanu Reeves apologizes for using "hippie psychobabble." It could ring out as a groaner of a meta-joke. After all, Reeves has gained himself a reputation for being something of a zen philosopher. While he doesn't speak in koans, he often does drop bon mots that seem just this side of those mediational phrases. However, as Dr. Perry Lyman, the actor delivers the line straight, without a hint of irony. 

Lyman is, in many ways, a natural fit for Reeves. While most have probably never looked at the actor and thought, "I bet he'd make a good orthodontist," Reeves never sticks out like a sore thumb (pun not intended but also not apologized for). The actor makes it make sense that Lyman would be the one adult that protagonist Justin (Lou Pucci) trusts to help him break his thumbsucking habit. He's a character overflowing with genuine kindness.

He's one of the few people in the movie who's honest about his own shortcomings. More importantly, he's one of the few who accepts Justin as is without insisting the lead never change.

The number of times Keanu Reeves has been a villain you can count on one hand. And you wouldn't need all your fingers. Seeing "The Gift," it's difficult to understand why.

In the supernatural thriller from writers Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson and director Sam Raimi, the most frightening thing in the swamp isn't local fortune teller Annie Wilson's (Cate Blanchett) visions. Instead, that dubious honor belongs to the all-too-human evil of Donnie Barksdale. Played with barely contained violence and unending selfishness by Reeves, Donnie is absolutely a monster. While twists and turns await, the actor precisely nails the tone to deliver the film's message. This is a story of men who try to control the women in their lives and the ugly, hateful ways they react to those who refuse to recognize their "right" to be in charge. While others do so with condescension and dismissiveness, Barksdale becomes a mad, snarling dog.

Given Reeves's filmography, it's especially interesting that he never attempts to provide Donnie with something behind the eyes. For an actor that typically found the goodness in all his characters, it's clear Reeves makes a conscious choice to present this domestic abuser as empty. He is a man who is exactly what he appears on the surface. There is no secret wound, no "stuck in a cycle of violence" justification. Donnie is a violent beast because that's all he wants to be.

Back in the day, one of the criticisms of Keanu Reeves was that when he went serious, he frequently sounded like Ted paraphrasing Shakespeare in "Bill & Ted." Given that, choosing to act in a Shakespearean adaptation seemed a foolhardy effort for the actor. Good thing Reeves decided to make the film instead of accepting assumptions about his skill.

Reeves wasn't unfamiliar with delivering lines in iambic pentameter thanks to his role in "My Private Idaho." However, when he stepped into the part of Don John, he added a subtle, seething unhappiness to his character. As a result, Don John speaks with a halting presentation, suggesting his struggle to finesse everything he says lest he genuinely speak his mind.

Some criticized Reeves at the time for seeming small compared to some of the cast's heavy hitters like Kenneth Branagh and Denzel Washington. But looking back now, it's an excellent choice for the character. The little half-brother of Washington's Don Pedro, Don John has spent years being reduced and shoved to the background. So it's no wonder Reeves performs him as a wounded, entitled younger sibling.

Johnny Utah. Is. An. FBI. AGENT!

He is also a very lost boy looking for something, anything, to give him purpose again.

A football star who watched everything go down the drain, Utah, years later, still doesn't seem to have found what to do next. Granted, Keanu Reeves gives him the kind of effortless charisma and physicality we'd expect from a top-shelf quarterback. But he also lets us see where it has chipped and peeled away. Reeves's Utah has momentum but no idea where to direct it.

That's why his infiltration of the Patrick Swayze-led gang of thieves feels so risky. It isn't just that Utah might be found out and thus killed. It's that Reeves makes the FBI agent feel lost enough that you can believe he might switch sides just to feel like he has a direction again. The above-paraphrased line is iconic for much the same reasons. Utah is trying to convey the gravity of the situation to bank robber Bodhi (Swayze), but for all his forcefulness, it sounds very much like a child trying to voice what they need. Reeves made it heartbreakingly clear that Utah is begging Bodhi not to make him do his job.

"River's Edge" is unquestionably a difficult film to watch. Filled with so much apathy that many of the characters border on sociopathic, it depicts how one member of a slacker clique murders someone and explores how that affects — or doesn't affect — the rest of the town.

Reeves' Matt stands out as the sole member of his friend group motivated to go to the authorities with the truth. His actions are a betrayal of his friends, and they also reveal how little such acts of honesty matter. The actor rarely speaks to those realities, but his face gives it away. His body language betrays a sense of defeat even before he goes to the police.

Matt was raised to accept failure — he has for so long that he doesn't just accept it anymore, he expects it. He's a teenager, and in many ways, he's already given up. So have his friends. The ending gives the teens something of an emotional catharsis, but Reeves's performance has already burrowed in too deep. He may have good days, we now realize, but that's the best he'll let himself believe.