Oh, I see it a little around the eyes…”Oh, I see it a little around the eyes…”
Keanu Reeves was not Western pop culture’s first white-passing Eurasian sleeper agent. We’d had them before: Vivien Leigh and Merle Oberon for example. And we would have them again: Hailee Steinfeld, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and even Rob Schneider.
But Keanu was different. He was hiding in plain sight. He kept his name (with the exception of a short-lived blip as white-bread K. C. Reeves) and with that came the inevitable discussion of his background. During many a chat show interview and in many a breathy teen magazine profile, the public was informed that his unusual moniker, courtesy of a white English mother and a mixed Chinese Hawaiian Portuguese father, meant “cool breeze over the mountains” and was surely a sign that baby Keanu was destined to be dreamy.
But at the time of baby Keanu’s birth on September 2, 1964, his parents’ marriage was illegal in six U.S. states. It would be another year before laws restricting immigration based on nationality, which targeted Asian immigrants, were struck down. In addition, Asian representation in Hollywood during this time period was, well, about what you would expect.
This is the era of the yellowface roles that everyone is properly embarrassed about now, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s being a well-known but sadly not unique example. Even if played by an Asian actor, Asian men were depicted as sexless, effeminate, sinister, inscrutable, and basically the last kind of person you’d want to stumble upon in a dark alley, let alone bring home to your mother. (George Takei’s Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek was a rare exception.)
Unsurprisingly, there were few well-known mixed white/Asian actors working when Keanu was growing up. Those who made it were often cast in stereotypical roles, like Nancy Kwan, or were forced to make their movies outside of Hollywood, like Bruce Lee. That is, if they looked noticeably Asian to Western audiences. Meanwhile, white-passing Eurasians, like the aforementioned Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh, kept their mixed backgrounds under close wraps so they could play the leading roles that were de facto reserved for white performers.
Things had improved a little by the time Keanu started his career in the late 1980s. Sure, some of the old racist and stereotypical parts still lingered (though by then they had an outside chance of being played by an Asian actor, such as Long Duk Dong in 1984’s Sixteen Candles). There were finally positive Asian role models in Western media, but, for the most part, those characters were more Asian than Asian American.
In movies and TV shows like Mulan, The Karate Kid, and Big Trouble in Little China, you can find badass Asian characters, but their backstories are all about CHINA/JAPAN/KOREA (and sometimes HONOR, but mostly CHINA/JAPAN/KOREA). These idealized and exoticized stories didn’t really reflect the experiences of children of the Asian diaspora, including Keanu. The lives of second- or third-generation Asian Americans, when represented at all, were often confined to Very Special Episodes and typically seen through the eyes of white characters. The “Hell Money” episode in the third season of The X-Files is a good example of this World Within a World, in which Mulder and Scully are the audience’s proxy into a mysterious community populated by Asians, to be viewed from the outside in. Asian stereotyping was soon replaced with a different problem: Asian tokenism. The ’80s and ’90s saw the rise of the ONE Asian character with a speaking role or the ONE Asian member of an ensemble team. From Power Rangers to Jurassic Park to Captain Planet to Die Hard, these characters were strong, they were smart, and they held their own. They were also never, ever the lead.
So how did Keanu pull off becoming a successful leading man in an era of swole Schwarzeneggers and cocky Cruises? Well, the most obvious explanation is that, like his biracial predecessors, he passed as white to a Western audience. The roles he was landing—the naif in period pieces, FBI agents, lone cops trying to take down evil Dennis Hopper—were gigs offered almost exclusively to white actors (and Will Smith). His character in Street Kings is even racist against Asians, for Neo’s sake.
Still, there’s something more about Keanu’s stardom that set him apart from these macho manly leads. It isn’t just that he showed a gentleness and sensitivity that was unusual in an action star (though that is certainly true). It’s not as if he was the only actor in the late ’80s and early ’90s with a special knack for playing vulnerable with a secret toughness, or tough with a secret vulnerability; River Phoenix and Johnny Depp were great at it, too. This combination of sex appeal and angst was perfect for the sensibilities of the Nevermind generation, whose own take on masculinity was only just emerging from a dusty Baby Boomer–shaped cocoon.
But what was unique to Keanu’s stardom was the specific way that his vulnerability was depicted: at times almost as feminine. In many ways, the true points of comparison are not other male leads but his contemporary female costars. The camerawork in such movies as Point Break and Little Buddha (1993) linger lovingly on his body with the same suggestiveness normally reserved for starlets, following the gaze of other characters as they consume him with their eyes. In these movies, he is a figure to be watched just as much as he does the watching, yet still within the framework of a traditional male role.
The specter of the effeminate Asian man trope might have lurked behind such creative decisions, but those portrayals traditionally used feminization as a misogynistic means of undermining a villainous character. Here, under Keanu’s watchful gaze, the trope has been inverted and elevated beyond the old comical or grotesque portrayals, perhaps by sheer dint of his magnetism, in service of his heroism. Even today, Asian men are rarely cast as the love interest, though there are a few notable exceptions. (Henry Golding, whose British charm offers him a recognizable way into potential movie stardom, Steven Yeun in The Walking Dead, and Manny Jacinto in The Good Place are a few.) In the early days of Keanu’s career, however, the Asian male dreamboat was essentially nonexistent in Western culture. Maybe that explains the bewildering tendency of ’90s filmmakers to cast one of the most stunning men ever captured on camera as the rejected suitor, one who loses out to such swains as a badly bewigged Gary Oldman and an elderly Jack Nicholson. The cinematography of these movies clearly portrays Keanu as babetacular, but the narratives can’t seem to make logical sense of the idea that someone ambiguous in so many ways could be a woman’s first choice. It’s as if the filmmakers couldn’t quite put their finger on what to do, and so they kept returning to strange echoes of racist Hollywood tropes.
The media begrudgingly acknowledged that Keanu’s ambiguity might be a big part of his sex appeal. Early profiles, including Vanity Fair’s “Kabuki Keanu,” leaned into this ambiguity hard by featuring our man in ’80s Goth club makeup, brooding for the camera. (A headline and creative direction that would be a no-no today, certainly.) Yet as night follows day and blockbuster movie follows thoughtful think piece, the (mostly straight white male) culture writers of the time Did Not Get It. To the media, he was a talentless and wooden male bimbo. (“Those exotic chops are patently not in receipt of electrical impulses from the brain in the conventional manner,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in a particularly scathing review for the Guardian.) And that’s even before the persistent homophobic whispers about his personal life. These “whispers” were a fancy version of “Lol, gay.” They were also not unlike the slightly queer-coded ways in which Asian men, from Charlie Chan to Fu Manchu, had been portrayed and belittled in Western film. But while these thunderous dismissals spoke to higher ideals of Taste, they seem, in hindsight, yet another way to emasculate and undercut Keanu’s appeal according to the messed-up mores of the day. (Keanu, to his credit, was one of the few stars who behaved like an adult when confronted with gay rumors in the ’90s. “People were saying that David Geffen and I had gotten married and it just blew me away. Not that they thought I was gay, but that they thought I could land a guy that hot.”) Nevertheless, here he was, in the thick of it, making blockbusters and prestigious literary adaptations with the best of them—and in the lead role to boot.
And while Keanu was playing sexy havoc with traditional male roles, something similarly confusing was brewing throughout the late ’80s through early ’90s with regards to female representation. Tempering the gains made by feminism with the conservatism of previous filmgoers, casting directors were especially fond of casting an eye back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, But Now With a Feisty Modern Twist. This is something demonstrated in the slew of Goth Audrey Hepburn wannabes that came to prominence in this era, from Winona Ryder to Helena Bonham-Carter to Natalie Portman. (The Jewish starlets grouped together in this Exotic-But-Not-Too-Much pigeonhole is an essay in and of itself.) And to be sure, these actresses had something about them that evoked the same ethereal beauty mixed with girl-next-door energy of peak gamine Audrey. They weren’t exactly her, per se, but they were close.
But none of them captured the same combination of relatable yet otherworldly, of being known yet unknowable, as much as Keanu. The true Goth Audrey Hepburn successor was there all along, taking almost the same wide-eyed roles (admittedly with extra blood and explosions). We all just missed it because he was a guy.
Allow us to explain. Both Keanu Reeves’s and Audrey Hepburn’s down-to-earth enigmatic appeal has been put to good use by filmmakers. Both actors have a knack for emoting through silent expression and artless gesture. Even without laying everything bare, they give us a mainline straight into their emotions. As a result, both are the ideal audience ciphers. You might go to a George Clooney movie to watch him be George Clooney, or a Will Smith movie to watch him be Will Smith, but with a Keanu Reeves movie, you go to see yourself be Keanu.
It is this connection to the audience that makes both actors the perfect fish out of water, able to move between worlds without becoming the Other. This is true of Keanu’s defining roles (Bill & Ted, Point Break, The Matrix) and Audrey’s (Roman Holiday, Funny Face, Sabrina, Charade, My Fair Lady). As they move through the world of the movie, their experiences are our experiences, and their emotions become our emotions.
But their thoughts are not necessarily our thoughts. A familiar trope in their movies is the sudden out-there decision—one that comes completely out of the blue for the audience but makes perfect emotional sense the moment it happens. You can probably call to mind some of Keanu’s characters’ impulsive momentum-shifting actions, including shooting Santino in John Wick 2, shooting himself in The Devil’s Advocate, and shooting the air while screaming in homoerotically charged frustration in Point Break.
Audrey’s roles, on the other perfectly gloved hand, are notably less trigger happy; her characters are more prone to suddenly running away from an unhappy situation. (See: running out of a New York City taxi in the rain in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to look for her cat or running away from a palace in a drug-fueled stupor to Experience Real Life in Roman Holiday). Still, as both movies involve a lonely protagonist’s life circumstances changing as symbolized by embracing and officially adopting a pet, in many ways John Wick is really just an extremely violent Holly Golightly. They even both have a certain way with sleek black tailoring.
In other words, it was Keanu, with his beautiful sexual, gender, and racial ambiguity, that is the true Gen X heir to the Audrey Hepburn throne. It is perhaps this very ambiguity that allows a wider range of people to see themselves in him, and put themselves in his shoes. And no movie has tapped into that better than The Matrix.
Keanu might not have been the first choice to play Neo (that would be Will Smith), but he was still perfect for the story’s enigmatic hero. The Matrix, like most cyberpunk fiction, is heavily influenced by Asian pop culture. This, unfortunately, can play out in a problematic Blade Runner “techno-orientalist” way, in which the world is full of Asian culture but zero to few characters of Asian descent. The Matrix neatly sidestepped this problem. Mixing Hong Kong kung-fu movie action, a traditional sifu/student plotline, and big Hollywood special effects, the movie is a hybrid of cultures that aspires to more than mere set dressing. By hiring Chinese trainer Yuen Woo Ping and mixed-race actors Marcus Chong and Keanu, Asians were brought back into a world that leans heavily on Asian imagery.
With his features that could pass as white but still read as slightly “exotic,” in the parlance of the press, Keanu was a perfect avatar to ease mainstream Western audiences accustomed to white leads into the universe of the story. In an inversion of old Hollywood, the bad guys in the Matrix franchise are interchangeable white men, and the good guys are the minority-majority misfits, the Children of Zion. The titular Matrix is populated with mainly white characters and coded in shiny, big-city, first-world privilege. Meanwhile, “reality” is post-apocalyptic and multiracial, with shades of the cities and regions that have been left to rot in the real world. Keanu, with his ethnically ambiguous looks and everyman otherworldliness, could exist in and between two worlds, focused on but set apart from both.
The story famously opens with a binary choice: blue pill or red pill, fantasy or reality. From the get-go, Neo must choose between these two states, with no space for liminality. From the first movie, in which Keanu gives an iconic Bruce Lee nose tap as he throws down with Laurence Fishburne in a VR dojo, to the final movie, where he’s able to move between the two worlds at will, Keanu is the embodiment of what it means to merge two disparate worlds into one identity. His universality is, well, universal.
The Matrix also marks a sea change in the way that minorities and mixed-race performers were portrayed in the media, which certainly picked up on the appeal of diversity in the late ’90s and early aughts. Accordingly, in the post-Matrix era, references to Keanu’s background kicked up a notch. “He’s the face of globalization: Born in Beirut to an English mother and a father of Hawaiian and Chinese descent, he’s a citizen of the world. And unlike the multiracial Vin Diesel, he saves the universe with geekiness, not mere muscle,” gushed a 2006 Wired article. He even played roles that were explicitly (in the case of 47 Ronin) or implicitly (in the case of Man of Tai Chi) mixed race. A 2003 New York Times article entitled “Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous” pegged movie stars like Vin Diesel and Jessica Alba as the exemplars of Gen Y (ye olde term for Millenials), the most ethnically diverse generation in American history. Mixed-race models and actors were valorized for their differences and for reflecting the “changing face of American beauty,” in accordance with “the new reality of America.”
But mixed-race people are nothing new, including in the movie world. People have been migrating between regions for millennia, and when people come together, they will inevitably get busy. Keanu wasn’t even the first mixed-race member of his family, let alone the first mixed-race Hollywood A-lister. It’s just that mixed-race stars of previous eras were allowed to be the lead only if their non-white heritage remained firmly in the closet. The one difference for this new generation of performers was that what was once a liability had become marketable, identified as trendy by the New York Times.
What was unusual about Keanu in the early days was that he was openly mixed race but still cast in roles usually performed by white actors. His fame served as the turning point between Asian Americans as sidekicks and Asian Americans as leads. In the wake of his rise came such A-listers as Lucy Liu, John Cho, Steven Yeun, Constance Wu, and Henry Golding. Now, Asian men could be stoner bros (Harold and Kumar), the likable everyman who comes into his own and gets the girl (The Walking Dead), the “My Daughter Is in Peril and I’m INTENSE” dad (Searching), the cute best friend the teenage heroine realizes she was in love with all along (Edge of Seventeen), the goofy point-of-view kid character (Up), and even the sexy love interest (everything Henry Golding has been in). Keanu was no mere Eurasian sleeper agent. He was a full-blown Eurasian Trojan horse.
So what is the future of Asians in Hollywood after Keanu? Well, we aren’t out of the woods yet. Movies like 21 straight up rewrote the real-life Asian Americans on whom the story was based as white, and white performers are still sometimes cast in Asian roles. But where this practice was once painfully normal, people are coming around to the idea that erasing Asian people from their own stories might be a bit on the fucked-up side. As frustrating as it might be to have Emma Stone cast as partly Hawaiian Chinese in Aloha, or rewriting Major Kusanagi as Major Killian to accommodate Scarlett Johansson as the lead in Ghost in the Shell, it at least sparks major discussion and criticism. Today, Asian American kids have more role models to look up to than Keanu did growing up in the 1970s and ’80s. There are major syndicated sitcoms like Fresh off the Boat, blockbuster movies like Crazy Rich Asians detailing the Asian American experience from the inside. Mixed-race kids now even get to see explicitly mixed Asian characters (such as the protagonists in Big Hero Six and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) actually played by actors of Asian descent instead of the brown-haired white actors favored in the past (looking at you, 3 Ninjas).
The most important aspect of these characters is that they are fully fleshed-out humans, with wants, needs, and desires that are just as important as those of white characters. They have personality traits beyond being “Asian.” Their background might come up as part of their backstory, or it might not be relevant. It’s a small step forward, but it’s a start. And perhaps, in some way, we have Keanu Reeves to thank.