In 47 Ronin, Keanu plays a skilled swordsman consigned to the fringes of society, accused of being a demon and referred to constantly as “Half Breed.” This role is unusual in a career during which he’s scarcely played straightforwardly “ethnic” or racialized characters. At the same time, he’s rarely been cast in the mold of a white, all-American hero. In The Matrix and John Wick, his characters seem to spring forth fully formed, unmoored from any family, at a remove from normal society.

And Keanu has often been racialized in subtle ways, described in interviews as “taciturn,” “laconic,” and “mysterious,”⁶¹ or, as another character describes him in Point Break, “young, dumb, and full of cum.” Less subtly, at the outset of his career in 1988, a Los Angeles Times article quoted the screenwriter and director Ron Nyswaner as saying of him: “He’s like a Chinese menu.”⁶² This epithet and those others don’t necessarily suggest racialization—Nyswaner would probably say he was unaware of Keanu’s Hawaiian-Chinese heritage—but they do fit a pattern.

In David Remnick’s biography of Obama, he writes about the tendency among scholars to treat Hawaii as “a kind of racial Eden.” He quotes from Romanzo Adams’s The Peoples of Hawaii, which claimed there was “abundant evidence that the peoples of Hawaii are in a process of becoming one people.”⁶³ The film professor R. L. Rutsky, in his essay “Being Keanu,” has critiqued the long history of “Western portrayals of Hawaiian and Pacific Island cultures as Edenic paradises filled with beautiful, sensual natives, untroubled by depth or thought.”⁶⁴

This casts a specific light on comments like those of director Bernardo Bertolucci who once said, ruminating on Keanu’s qualities: “There’s this fantastic line about Henry James—I think it was T. S. Eliot who said it: ‘His sublime mind was never violated by an idea,’ meaning that James was beyond ideas.”⁶⁵ But where Eliot was discussing James’s fiction, Bertolucci is describing how he sees Keanu himself—his appearance, his speech, his acting. He is the sensual native, his mind unviolated by ideas—too in touch with the “sublime” (a word not used by Eliot) to express rational thought. Despite never having lived in Hawaii, Keanu struggles to escape its sensuous shadow.