Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves is a Canadian-American actor whose four-decade career has produced multiple film franchise roles — including Neo across the Matrix film franchise (1999–2003, 2021) and John Wick across the John Wick action-thriller series (2014–2023). He was born Keanu Charles Reeves on September 2, 1964, in Beirut, Lebanon. His father Samuel Nowlin Reeves Jr. was an American-Hawaiian-Chinese geologist, and his mother Patricia Taylor was an English costume designer. His parents separated when he was three, and he was raised primarily by his mother across multiple cities — eventually settling in Toronto, Canada.

His acting career began with Canadian TV roles in the early 1980s. His film breakthrough came with 1986 River's Edge and the 1989 cult comedy Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure — the time-traveling-airhead comedy in which he played the Ted "Theodore" Logan opposite Alex Winter's Bill S. Preston Esq. The Bill & Ted franchise produced two sequels (1991 and 2020) across three decades.

His 1990s peak roles included Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991, opposite Patrick Swayze), Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha (1993, in which he played the Prince Siddhartha), Jan de Bont's Speed (1994, opposite Sandra Bullock — the Los Angeles bus-bomb thriller that became one of the American action films of the 1990s), and the Wachowski sisters' The Matrix (1999, in which he played the Neo opposite Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss).

The Matrix franchise — including the 1999 original, the 2003 sequels (The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions), and the 2021 The Matrix Resurrections — has been continuously cited as one of the American sci-fi film franchises of the 21st century. His subsequent John Wick franchise (2014, 2017, 2019, 2023) has produced over $1 billion in worldwide box office. He has continuously been cited as one of the American Hollywood-celebrities-people-actually-like figures, with multiple public stories of generosity-and-humility on film sets and at public events. He has been with American visual artist Alexandra Grant since 2019.

His name Keanu is from the Hawaiian language meaning "the cool breeze over the mountains" or "cool breeze." Keanu has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names since the 1990s.