In Hollywood, the rumour mill is always cooking up new and strange stories about your favourite celebrities. After all, the general public loves nothing more than reading gossip about the hot young stars of the day. In the 1990s, though, before the days of social media, the rumours didn’t hit quite as instantaneously as they do today, but they actually stood a chance of sticking around for much longer. Take, for example, the utterly bizarre rumour that Keanu Reeves was secretly married to legendary record executive David Geffen, a man he had never met. That weird story first got legs in 1995, and Reeves was still being asked about it four years later.

After the enormous success of Speed in 1994, Reeves entered a strange period in his career. Most Hollywood insiders expected him to capitalise on cementing himself as an action star, but instead, he chose to star in misfires like Johnny Mnemonic and Chain Reaction, in addition to indie efforts such as Feeling Minnesota and The Last Time I Committed Suicide. Worse, though, was when he chose to try his hand at playing Hamlet on stage in Winnipeg, Canada, instead of signing up for Speed 2: Cruise Control – a move that effectively got him blacklisted by Fox for a decade.

It was while playing the tragic prince of Denmark in the chilly Winnipeg winter that Reeves first heard the truly strange Geffen rumour and was completely bemused. He found out that it had started in Spanish and Italian newspapers and was soon repeated by rags in Los Angeles and New York. It might have been easier to understand where it had come from if Reeves had some sort of pre-existing relationship with Geffen, but as he told Vanity Fair, “I’ve never met the man.”

In truth, rumours about Reeves’ sexuality had been doing the rounds in Hollywood for years at that point. So, even though he laughed it off by saying, “It’s so ridiculous, I find it funny,” gossip mongers still used the fact that he has always been so private about his personal life as a chink in his armour. After all, their logic was that a handsome A-lister who had no high-profile romances with women must be homosexual – instead of simply someone uncomfortable with broadcasting his love life.

Fascinatingly, when the Vanity Fair interviewer told Reeves that he should have denied that he was gay outright instead of playfully telling Interview magazine, “But ya never know,” the star had a customarily sensitive, thoughtful response. “Well, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being gay, so to deny it is to make a judgment,” reasoned Reeves. “And why make a big deal of it? If someone doesn’t want to hire me because they think I’m gay, well, then I have to deal with it, I guess… But otherwise, it’s just gossip, isn’t it?”

Frustratingly, though, the rumour hung around like a bad smell so effectively that Empire asked Reeves about it again in 1999. This time, he lamented, “What do I say to that? I don’t know how to answer this,” before adding, “For me, it’s as if it exists in another universe that doesn’t have much to do with me. And when you have to visit that universe, that’s what you deal with.”

Indeed, the star’s only conclusion was, “I guess it’s bad taste.”

The fact that the rumour persisted for so long gets even weirder when you consider that Geffen himself was quoted by Vanity Fair at the time confirming Reeves’ claim that they’d never met. In fact, the outlet even noted that Geffen was “more than a little exasperated” that he kept being asked about a rumour that had no more basis in reality than the similarly longstanding one concerning Richard Gere and a poor gerbil.

“I’ve never laid eyes on him,” stated Geffen emphatically. “It’s just an ugly, mean-spirited rumour meant to hurt him because he’s a movie star.”

Geffen added that he was particularly perplexed by the rumour’s legs because he knew for a fact that a lot of it was made up out of thin air by people he was tangentially connected to. “I even had a friend say that his trainer said he was at the wedding,” the music mogul concluded in dismay. “You think I could keep something like that secret? And then people saying I bought Keanu $15,000 worth of clothes at Barneys. I mean, come on.”