Keanu Reeves is whatever you want him to be

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When Keanu Reeves walked onstage at a video game conference in Los Angeles in June, Peter Sarkisyan marveled at how the actor seemed to transcend his earthly form.

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Maybe it was Reeves lanky silhouette, shrouded in a cloud of smoke. Or, perhaps, it was the connection he felt with the actor, who, like Sarkisyans mother, was born in Lebanon and donates to cancer research. But Reeves was the man Sarkisyan aspired to be. He cried out from his seat: “Youre breathtaking!”

“I thought, Dude, this is me in the future,” Sarkisyan, 33, an online gamer who goes by the name “Peter Sark,” recalled in a recent interview. “Keanu speaks truth. Hes nice to people. I just said what everyone was thinking.”

Reeves has been a cipherlike presence for much of his three-decade movie career, shifting from the reluctant hero of The Matrix series, which brought in $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, to a puppy-loving assassin in John Wick, to a sad-looking sandwich eater who launched a thousand memes.

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People project onto the 54-year-old actor what they want to see in themselves. “There is an ambiguity about him,” said William Irwin, a philosophy professor at Kings College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who lectures about pop culture and philosophy. “Hes not androgynous. Hes not alpha male. Hes masculine and feminine in a way.”

Like Bill Murray before him, who achieved status as a sometimes secular saint three decades after Ghostbusters, Reeves is accessible and, at the same time, not. He is a pop icon for these times when people seek mindfulness as a way to make sense of a confusing, cynical world.

Look. There he is, pensive. Like when talk show host Stephen Colbert recently asked him in a half-joking tone, “What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?” The actor sighed. “I know that the ones who love us will miss us,” he replied.

It is refreshing, too, in an era of airbrushed social media influencers, to see a celebrity so at ease with fame. In March, Reeves and others aboard a flight from San Francisco to Burbank, California, got stranded in Bakersfield. A video of a rumpled Reeves in a van reading aloud to fellow passengers was posted on Instagram.

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There are prayer candles with Reeves image and diaries for sale on Amazon that ponder, “What Would Keanu Reeves Do?” BuzzFeed recently had the actor cuddle with puppies while answering fan questions. (“No, were not going to play in the puppy pee!” he cooed.) He has his own film festival, KeanuCon, which debuted in Scotland in April. Fans, too, recently launched a petition to name him Times “Person of the Year.” (More than 150,000 have signed on.)

And his response to Sarkisyans adulation was very much in keeping with what we have come to expect from the actor who defined teenage exuberance in the 1980s in Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure. “Youre breathtaking!” Reeves shouted from the stage, while the crowd wildly cheered. “Youre all breathtaking!”

Reeves is achingly private, and what little is known about him is plowed terrain. His father left home when he was a boy, was arrested in 1994 for drug dealing and spent two years in jail. Reeves was born in Beirut and grew up in Toronto, before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting. (His mother, a costume designer, is English; his father is Chinese and Hawaiian.) In the late 1990s, he had a child with his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Syme. It was stillborn. The couple broke up and, two years later, Syme was killed in a car accident. Reeves owns a house in the Hollywood Hills and rides motorcycles. He is left-handed.

Perhaps it is his perceived vulnerability that people find so appealing. “He has his interests and pursuits, but he doesnt have airs about him,” Irwin said. “He doesnt pretend to be something he is not. He has a quest quality, searching.”

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Of his movie roles, cultural critic Joe Queenan said this in a 2008 article published in The Guardian: He plays characters that “the audience views more with affection than with reverence or idolatry, like a kid brother who has bitten off more than he can chew and may need outside help to survive.”

Of course, some critics might ascribe his current surge in popularity to the Hollywood marketing machine. In 2016, Reeves left his longtime agents at Creative Artists Agency for rival William Morris Endeavor Entertainment. This year, he has been everywhere promoting John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, his first No. 1 box office hit in 11 years; Netflixs Always Be My Maybe, in which he plays a parody of himself; Toy Story 4; and the recently announced third installment in the Bill & Ted movies, due in theaters next year, more than 30 years after the first.