Keanu Reeves Has The Weirdest Souvenir From The Matrix
Keanu Reeves owns the first "red pill" the Wachowskis gave him in making The Matrix.
Keanu Reeves has recently been on a press junket for the upcoming John Wick: Chapter 4 and he has been delivering some gems of info, like how he wants to fight Denzel Washington. In a Reddit AMA, the Bram Stoker’s Dracula star revealed a number of items that he had kept as souvenirs from various movies, one of which was the very first “red pill” given to him by the Wachowskis from the Matrix series. Given the importance of that iconic pharmaceutical in the first movie’s plot and the weird cultural weight it has developed since, it is a pretty cool thing to own.
In the first Matrix movie, Keanu Reeves’s Thomas Anderson (aka Neo) meets the mysterious Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who offers him two pills, one red and one blue. According to Morpheus, the blue pill will cause someone to “wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” In contrast, the red pill makes one “stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Basically, it is a metaphor for the choice Keanu Reeves is making to actively search for the truth of reality (plus, narratively acts as a homing beacon for his actual physical body in the real world).
As such, this is a pretty cool thing for Keanu Reeves to have been given as a memory of arguably his most iconic role. It also implies the existence of many other red pill props, which makes sense, but it is still funny to think of someone losing the single red pill on the set of The Matrix and having to scramble for it.
Along with the red pill, Keanu Reeves revealed that he has the wedding ring and watch owned by his character in the John Wick series as well as a sword from his notorious samurai fantasy film 47 Ronin. It is unclear whether those are the only props that the famously non-materialistic Reeves has retained over the years, but if he could only pick a few, that would be them. That, and maybe a surfboard from Point Break.
John Wick: Chapter 4 will see Keanu Reeves back as the merciless but still somehow sympathetic mass murderer and widower, this time going up directly against the High Table that seems to secretly run the world from the shadows. He will be joined by several returning stars including Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Lance Reddick, and a number of new possible allies or adversaries (or both), like martial arts legends Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada, Clancy Brown, and frequent portrayer of monsters Bill Skarsgard.
The John Wick series already has a fifth movie in the works, so we can probably be assured that Keanu Reeves will be making it through the latest installment (though we would not put money on anybody else, especially new star Scott Adkins). In addition, the John Wick franchise will soon have several spin-offs, including the Ana de Armas film Ballerina and a prequel series set on the Continental hotel.
