The serene grace of Keanu Reeves
A Hollywood star is his own religion
Published in
9 min readMay 25, 2024
Is Keanu Reeves like Jesus? He’s never played Jesus. And yet a certain religious quality might be found in many of his onscreen performances.
I noticed an A.I. photo of Keanu as Jesus that Tim Denning introduced in 2023 and made famous online. He does seem to have a certain…serene grace? I find myself thinking over his career for this quality.
The word often used of him as “ambiguous.”
To follow Keanu’s career, one would have no idea that he lived in an era dominated by the categories of race, sex, and sexuality. He seems to destabilize them all!
Born in Beirut in 1964, his father, Samuel, was Hawaiian/Chinese, as his mother, Patricia, is British. In Hollywood, he seemed vaguely ‘ethnic’.
Efforts were made along the way to ‘whiten’ him.
A new name was offered him: ‘Chuck Spandin’, or ‘Templeton Page Taylor’. He stuck with ‘Keanu’, a Hawaiian word that means…
