While auditioning actors for a role has been a standard industry practice since the dawn of the moving image, there are a thousand different ways to go about it. Keanu Reeves was hardly a novice when he threw his hat into the ring for a part, only to discover the requirements differed from what he’d become accustomed to.
It’s probably been a long time since Reeves has even had to attend a casting call, seeing as he’s been a star for over 30 years. Sure, there have been some lulls during his three-decade stint as a household name, but he hasn’t fallen on times hard enough to reduce him to just another name on the list.
On the other hand, it might make sense to put him through his paces for a conventional drama. That’s not to say he’s a bad actor despite what the bad-faith discourse may say, but all anyone needs to look at are Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing to see that it would be for the best were Reeves to prove his chops before being hired for a period piece.
That said, his final credit, before he landed his breakthrough role as Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, was a period piece, and a three-time Oscar-winning one at that after Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons scooped Oscars for its adapted screenplay, art direction, and costume design.
Fresh from a critical and awards season darling, Reeves was in the mix to be cast as a rock-obsessed slacker, a surprisingly arduous process that carried some intimate undertones from his recollection. “There was one extraordinary event that occurred,” he recalled to Steve Pond. “In that, the last audition was seven hours long. It was like a revolving door with partners. They were just matching people up.”
On the surface, that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. When multiple actors test for a set number of parts, different combinations are paired to see if they’ve got the requisite sparks and chemistry. For Reeves, though, he got the feeling that there was something more sensual afoot.
“It was sort of sexual,” he suggested. “It was sort of like an orgy. Reminded me of Rome. But they got who they wanted, I guess, and luckily, I was one of the people they wanted.” Of course, the other was Alex Winter, who would go on to become one of Reeves’ closest friends, and the two hit it off from the start thanks to an audition that led to Reeves discovering “serendipitously our ideas were the same.”
It should go without saying that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is most definitely not a movie that gives off Caligula-esque vibes. Then again, Reeves was the one who auditioned and couldn’t shake the evocations of Roman debauchery from his mind, making him much better placed to comment than anybody else.
