Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves was born in Beirut in 1964 and grew up largely in Toronto, a background of no obvious use in Hollywood. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in 1989 handed him a persona - amiable, faintly adrift - that the industry then spent years trying to get him to repeat. He declined more often than he agreed. Point Break and My Own Private Idaho both appeared in 1991, an action picture and a Gus Van Sant drama, which is not a pairing anyone was managing at the time.

Speed in 1994 was the commercial break. It cost thirty million dollars and took around 350 million worldwide, establishing him as an action lead at roughly the moment he stopped behaving like one. In early 1995 he played Hamlet at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, to sold-out houses, which is not a standard use of that sort of leverage. He did not return for the sequel when it came in 1997, and by the end of the decade the general view was that the moment had gone.

The Matrix opened on 31 March 1999, took around 466 million dollars worldwide and won four Academy Awards, all technical. It also produced a set of images that the following ten years of action cinema borrowed without much embarrassment. Reeves returned for The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in 2003, which took 739 million and 427 million worldwide respectively. For a stretch of about four years he was the most reliable draw in the genre.

Then the second restart, which is what the comparison across decades actually illuminates. John Wick in 2014 was a modest film, 86 million worldwide, and it grew into a series that passed a billion dollars by 2023, with Chapter 4 alone taking over 447 million. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005; his band Dogstar, formed in 1991, put out a record again in 2023. The photographs are unusually undramatic across thirty-five years, and so is the explanation.