How Keanu Reeves Rescued Us From Our Apartment

“Whoa”

We lay on the floor of our apartment, sprawled.

The window AC unit whirred like a lawn mower.

Sweat dripped from my roommate’s brow as she and I tried to fall asleep in the summer heat.

Five months into the pandemic, all of the turmoil left us simultaneously overwhelmed and understimulated, with naught but each other for company.

We were acquaintances when it began, meeting through our mutual friends and bonding over a love of One Direction. As soon as the quarantine orders came through, I turned to her and said, “No matter how this pans out, you and I are about to be bonded for life.”

Then there he was, riding in on a horse with his hair blowing in the wind.

Our knight in Shakespearean clothing.

Keanu Reeves rescued us from the doldrums and upheaval.

We popped Kenneth Branagh’s movie on because I believe my roommate had not yet seen it, and we were looking for something, anything, to keep us occupied. We were enraptured even though Keanu is, God bless, miscast as Don John. There is a scene, though, where he raves about being a villain with his shirt off, so we were hooked.

The next day, it was Speed on the 4th of July, followed swiftly by The Devil’s Advocate and Something’s Gotta Give. From there, it was a daily occurrence over the next two months.

We had, of course, loved Keanu before, but we entered our own personal Keanu-ssance. What started as a new hunk to obsess over evolved into a challenge. My roommate decided to watch every fictional film Keanu had ever starred in and rank her preferences.

We ordered a whiteboard and set off on our journey.

It wasn’t long until she roped me in.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was my gateway drug. I had never seen it before and fell in love with the San Dimas pair. I cut my hair into a mullet, and when my birthday came around, we had everyone dress up over Zoom as their favorite figure from history while my roommate and I sported our Bill and Ted looks.

We began ranking our favorites based on a very individual system, all personal biases included.

This continued until my roommate got through all sixty films. Personally, I only made it through thirty-four, but I’ve been able to get that up to forty since the end of our marathon.

Is Keanu Reeves a good actor?

Our conclusion: Yes. But you have to know how to use him. Female directors in particular know exactly how to do so.

• Something’s Gotta Give by Nancy Meyers
• The Matrix series by the Wachowski Sisters
• Always Be My Maybe by Nahnatchka Khan and Ali Wong
• Point Break by Kathryn Bigelow

Women know what other women see in him.

I broke into a literal flop sweat and fell out of my chair when he first appeared in Always Be My Maybe. I wish I was exaggerating.

The way Keanu looks at a woman, sees her, made us feel seen. For two gals running circles around a small apartment for months on end, Keanu was our mutual boyfriend.

Keanu’s on and off-screen relationships with women such as Sandra Bullock, Charlize Theron, Winona Ryder, and Diane Keaton gave us hope for our lonely hearts. My mother even joined in from across the country, sending us her copy of A Walk in the Clouds and FaceTiming to watch Constantine for the first time with us.

We celebrated the completion of our marathon by visiting Keanu’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — we even cleaned up the smudge on it to leave him sparkling clean.

During this whole venture, I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what it was at the time, and this would unfortunately become the first of many. I was hyperventilating on the couch, rocking back and forth, spiraling. My roommate rushed over with a TikTok edit of Keanu — a mash-up of his roles set to the song “Still Into You” by Paramore. She played it on a loop until my breathing slowed.

I chuckled my way out of the cortisol spike and wiped away tears as I swooned over Ted “Theodore” Logan.

“You should get a tattoo of Bill and Ted,” she said.

“If I were to get a Keanu tattoo, it would have to be Neo,” I replied.

So we got Keanu tattoos. She got “Johnny Utah” from Point Break in a sailor heart, and I got the name “Neo” from The Matrix with Keanu’s signature sunglasses. The bond was now inked on us forever.

As we came to know my fellow Virgo more intimately, my roommate and I grew closer too. She’s one of my closest friends and eventually introduced me to the love of my life with whom now he and I live happily together so I owe her a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.

Those two months became some of my happiest memories. Despite everything around us, when we were home with Keanu, everything was okay.

Don’t worry: the whiteboard is well preserved and wrapped in packing plastic to ensure it lives on forever.

In the immortal words of Bill and Ted:

“Be excellent to each other. Party on, dudes!”

Revised Keanu Ranking as of 2023:

1. The Matrix*
2. Speed**
3. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure*
4. Constantine*
5. A Walk in the Clouds*
6. Something’s Gotta Give
7. Sweet November**
8. Always Be My Maybe
9. Point Break*
10. My Own Private Idaho*
11. The Devil’s Advocate*
12. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
13. A Scanner Darkly*
14. John Wick
15. The Replacements*
16. Parenthood*
17. The Gift*
18. The Lake House
19. Much Ado About Nothing*
20. The Matrix Reloaded
21. Man of Tai Chi
22. The Matrix Resurrections
23. John Wick: Chapter 4
24. John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum
25. Hardball*
26. Destination Wedding
27. Toy Story 4
28. 47 Ronin*
29. The Matrix Revolutions
30. Babes in Toyland
31. John Wick: Chapter 2
32. Siberia
33. Bill & Ted Face the Music
34. Chain Reaction
35. The Day the Earth Stood Still
36. Thumbsucker
37. Dangerous Liaisons
38. I Love You to Death*
39. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
40. The Bad Batch

If you would like to read my roommate’s NSFW article in which she ranked and reviewed all sixty movies for Merry-Go-Round magazine, you can read it here: “Keanu is For the Girls: One Woman’s Odyssey Through Keanu Reeves’ Filmography”

“Vaya con Dios” — Johnny Utah, Point Break (1991)