I realize that I’ve been conflating Keanu’s characters with Keanu himself. Personally, I don’t mind. I think a large part of his appeal derives from the possibility his characters might really be him. He’s one of only a few actors instantly recognizable by their first name and the way they talk (down to the pronunciation of the word dude).

He’d never be able to subsume himself in a real-life personality like Julian Assange or John Paul Getty III. Or, I’m sure he could, but what would be the point? Those are roles for actors desperate to show off their acting. The pleasure in watching Keanu is seeing him being Keanu.

So maybe it’s no coincidence that over the course of his career he’s played eight characters named John and an alien called Klaatu (which sounds a lot like Keanu). Most of his characters have an almost interchangeable quality, both with each other and the actor who plays them.

There are also particular themes that bind his movies together. I like to keep track of the laced motifs of drowsiness and spiritual awakening: My Own Private Idaho starts with a close-up on the dictionary definition of “narcolepsy”; Johnny Mnemonic, set in the year 2021, begins with Keanu’s character receiving a “wake-up call”; Street Kings begins with Keanu’s alarm going off as he hides under the duvet; in Little Buddha, Siddhartha (played by Keanu) rides out of the palace on a white horse as a monk says, “his dream was ending and his long waking was begun”; and in Point Break, Keanu comes under the spell of a surfer called Bodhi, whose name in Sanskrit refers to the process of spiritual awakening.

Keanu’s acting emphasizes sameness rather than difference, exploiting the blurred line between his on- and off-screen personas. And the evasiveness of his interviews—where he seems not to care especially whether people think he’s like Ted from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—adds to this blurred impression. As with Odysseus, he knows his control over himself is partial.

In this essay, I quote from interviews with Keanu, dialogue spoken by Keanu’s characters, and speeches by Obama. Of course, I know that Obama is real in a way Keanu’s characters aren’t, but the Keanu-composite in my head—formed over years of watching and living with his characters—feels as real to me, to the extent that it would be strange to treat it as purely fictional. His dialogue could have been performed by other actors, but those characters wouldn’t exist in the same way.

And perhaps that says something about how racialization works. The color of your skin and your personal attributes may be theoretically separate—as a writer, I can hide behind language, constructing a narrative that floats free of my identity—but, in reality, they’re inextricable. Wherever I go, I’m read as a person of color. And this experience ends up seeping back into my writing. I can’t escape myself. So when I watch movies I can’t help but mentally flip between actors and the characters they play, between real-life and made-up, because it’s true of how I see the world.