Ask anyone who knows about films, and they’ll probably tell you that they love Keanu Reeves. From his days dodging bullets in The Matrix or going on ‘Excellent Adventures’ with his friend Bill to his more recent outings as John Wick in the block-busting action series, Reeves has amassed legions of fans and put on enough great performances to make anyone blush.
Nobody bats a thousand, however, not even our Keanu. The Canadian dream-boat has been in some absolute stinkers in his time, including but not limited to Scott Derrickson’s ghastly remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Little Buddha, in which he does an unforgivable Indian accent. According to the man himself, however, his most disappointing gig wasn’t a movie or TV show, but rather a classic of the stage.
In 1995, Reeves joined the cast of the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of Hamlet. He took the part of the Danish Prince just one year after the global success of Speed, so he was in a great place career-wise. He was thrilled to be given the chance to play such an important character but had reservations about his actual performance.
“To play that dude is, well, it’s worth it, in spite of the fact I wasn’t too good, at first,” Reeves told The Virginian Pilot. “On opening night, I couldn’t breathe. I had to get over that. I was like a deer caught in the floodlights. I was, kinda, mesmerised. On the second night, I was better. The reviews were bad, understandably, but a few critics came back later in the run, and I was better.” Maybe they would have taken him more seriously if he didn’t refer to one of Shakespeare’s most enduring creations as ‘dude’.
With one of the most famous men in the world in the lead role – not to mention the fact that he was a home country hero – anticipation for Reeves’ Hamlet was sky-high. Reviews ranged from snotty and brattish about Reeves’ apparent inability to contain all of the words of Shakespeare in his head to being far more empathetic yet still admitting the star was just not quite up to the challenge.
Reeves really should have learnt his lesson from his appearance in the 1993 film version of Much Ado About Nothing. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, this interpretation of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy received rave reviews on the whole, but most critics pointed out how badly the up-and-comer did as Don John. To give him some credit, he was playing opposite Denzel Washington’s Don Pedro, so it would have taken a minor miracle for him to be the better of the two half-brothers.
Mercifully, there were people in the audience for Hamlet who did think that Reeves was a good actor. “[He] quite embodied the innocence, the splendid fury, the animal grace of the leaps and bounds, the emotional violence, that form the Prince of Denmark,” wrote critic Roger Lewis, calling him, “one of the top three Hamlets I have seen.” At least somebody liked it.
