‘I wanted to do pulpy, hyper-violent action’: Keanu Reeves on his novel with China Miéville and the afterlife of The Matrix

Keanu Reeves has a reputation to maintain as one of the nicest, humblest guys on the Hollywood A-list, and maintain it he does. Grizzled of beard, spiky of hair, in a V-neck T-shirt under a dark suit teamed, oddly, with chunky brown hiking boots, it’s Reeves – rather than the anticipated team of flunkies – who sets about moving side tables and pouring everyone glasses of water as we begin our interview in a suite in a Fitzrovia hotel.

He’s here with the writer China Miéville to talk about their collaboration on Reeves’s first novel, The Book of Elsewhere, and he does the nice/humble guy thing again almost immediately the interview proper begins. Very early on, he says categorically, “I didn’t want to write the book. I wanted another creator to take that journey. So, ultimately, China has written the novel. It’s not, like, we could look at page eight and say, ‘Oh, I wrote this section.’ I didn’t write any of the novel.’”

As Reeves describes it, the collaboration began when the two met face-to-face in Berlin in 2021 – “pure luck,” says Miéville, “that we happened to be in the same city at the time” – and it was the star courting the writer, rather than the other way round: “You brought your notebook,” Reeves says to Miéville, “and you had some ideas out of the gate. And basically, it was like, ‘I have some questions for you. Before I decide to say yes or no to this, I have some questions.’”

“I don’t think I sounded quite so grand!” protests Miéville, causing his collaborator to roar with laughter. “You did sound so grand,” Reeves says, mock-reverently. “You are so grand.”

Were you starstruck? “Practically, yeah!” says the actor, who has reportedly been paid more per movie than anyone else in history. It is the superhero team-up nobody had on their bingo cards. But from the way the two men interact and speak about it, their creative collaboration seems to have turned into a full-blown bromance.

Reeves was already a fan of Miéville’s work – he had optioned one of the writer’s short stories some years back – and when the publishers of Reeves’s comic-book series, BRZRKR, suggested a novel, “they asked me what would be my dream for who to write the novel? And I was, like: China Miéville.”

The project comes, though, with reputational risks for both, doesn’t it? Reeves is a hugely well-loved movie actor – and when actors turn their hands to fiction the critics aren’t always kind. For every Sam Shepard, there’s a Sean Penn. (Miéville stifles a giggle.) And as for Miéville, as one of the best-regarded science fiction/fantasy writers in the language, he’s hardly a hack for hire: wasn’t he worried that people would think he’d sold out by hitching his wagon to a Hollywood celebrity?

That Berlin meeting was where they hit it off, each responding to the other’s “generosity”: Reeves delighted by the ideas Miéville brought to the character; Miéville by the freedom Reeves would give him to develop those ideas in his own direction. “I feel like we have a kinda shared taste,” Reeves says. “To me,” says Miéville, “it felt like there’s no point doing a novel that is just the telling of the comic that does the same thing. That’s just not very interesting. The whole project that Keanu has about collaboration is precisely about people who create in different forms. So, to me, one of the key things was: do I have ideas that interest Keanu, and do those ideas honour the source material, but also do things with it that are specifically literary, specifically novelistic?”

The meeting brought together two men at the top of their respective fields, but from rather different worlds. Reeves started his acting career at the age of nine, and has starred in a string of era-defining movies – from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Point Break, the Matrix series and the John Wick films. He lives in the Hollywood Hills with his partner of five years, the visual artist Alexandra Grant, with whom he collaborated on two previous books, a “grown-up picture book” called Ode to Happiness in 2011, and an art book, Shadows (2016), to which Grant contributed photographs and Reeves text. In 2021, he branched out into comics with the bestselling BRZRKR series, co-written with Matt Kindt.

Miéville lives in north-west London with his wife, the artist and writer Season Butler. The only person to have won the Arthur C Clarke award three times, he has written novellas, short stories, comics, children’s stories, RPG games and (building on his doctorate from LSE in international relations) a Marxist treatise on international law, in addition to his novels for adults – which include Perdido Street Station, The City & the City, and Embassytown. It has been more than a decade since he published a full-length novel, though, so The Book of Elsewhere will be a huge deal for his fans, as well as Reeves’s.

The actor’s input to The Book of Elsewhere was the protagonist Unute – also known as B – the 80,000-year-old immortal warrior with a Wolverine-style healing power and glowing blue eyes who starred in the BRZRKR series. He’s been around the block a few times, has old Unute. On the rare occasions someone succeeds in killing him, he respawns like a video-game character, hatching from an egg, and in relatively short order resumes his vocation of pulling off people’s arms and legs.

As we meet him in the comics, he works for, or rather with, a US government black-ops team with the vague quid pro quo that if the scientists studying him come up with a way to make him mortal, he gets it. What Reeves calls “the acronyming of the name” – B for “berserker”, and the vowel-less title of the comic – comes from the government association. “In exchange for the violence he can provide, he allows them to study him. B felt like military shorthand. And for me, it’s very much about the duality of the character – there’s his human birth name, and there’s this other name he’s given.”

Talking about the origins of Unute, Reeves says: “The germ of the idea was just a character who could punch through chests and rip arms off. I wanted to do a pulpy, hyper-violent action idea. I’ve played a bunch of different characters involved in action. Growing up I quite enjoyed those stories. I guess, from there, that kernel of an idea, it’s like, well, who could do that? Then it just started to bloom in my imagination into this character.”

He thought his way into the part as an actor would. “Who is it? Maybe it’s like this. And why is this character? Maybe it’s a tribe, that’s being attacked ... And maybe it’s 80,000 years ago. And maybe he’s cursed with violence and can’t help it. And he’s half-god, half-human, half-alien ... and what does he want? Where’s he from? What caused this? How does that character love, and how do they live ... ?

“I didn’t want to do a vampire story – you know, kind of fatigued and immortal,” he says, before adopting a languid upper-class British accent. “‘I’m so tired. I’m so tired of life and drinking blaahd ... ’ I didn’t want him to be a werewolf, like when the moon came out ... I wanted something else.”

The other thing that stands out about Unute, in the comics at least, is that he’s drawn as, um, Keanu Reeves. “There’s a marvellous artist who does the illustrations in the comic book named Ron Garney,” Reeves says. “And his first question, he was like: [growls gruffly]: ‘OK, kid, what does he look like?’ And I was, like [flat voice]: ‘Me.’ And he was, like: ‘OK.’ Then I went: ‘But not me.’ And he went: ‘OK.’”

Was that because he had an eye to playing Unute in a movie version? “I didn’t think that at the time when I was asked that question. I don’t know: maybe I was just narcissistic. I was, like: ‘Fuck, yeah, I want to be Berserker!’ Yeah. Why not?”

BRZRKR sold a ton, and it’s a very comic-booky sort of comic book: a lot of kinetic Frank Miller-style ultraviolence, with ripped-out spines and torn-off jaws and skulls punched into blobs of red mist studded with flying teeth. It’s a ride. But as Reeves and Miéville agreed, a novel could – and needed to – do something a little different.

The book isn’t a prequel or sequel to the self-contained tale in the comics; more a separate story with different versions of the same characters. “That’s a good way to think about it,” Miéville says, when I ask if it’s along the lines of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion idea – a different avatar of the same character. Being Miéville, the story is full of literary and historical in-jokes: an attempt, says the writer, to marry the “mythic element” of the character with something “quite grounded”.

One of Unute’s marriages breaks up after the 1648 Peace of Münster, for instance, and when I say I think there’s something of Charles Maturin’s 1820 Melmoth the Wanderer in Miéville’s version of the character he starts waggling his index finger up and down, which, he explains, “I picked up from my brother-in-law: it’s apparently what people in his area of Mexico do when they strongly agree with you.”

In this novel, unlike Maturin’s gothic classic, though, the protagonist is being chased through time and space by a giant, angry, tusked deer-pig. That was Miéville’s invention. (“I bet you wanted it to be a giant squid,” I say to the famously cephalopod-loving author. “I don’t want to become too much of a self-cliche,” he says.)

But The Book of Elsewhere springs from a hint in the original comics. A one-panel easter egg about Sigmund Freud meeting Unute turns into a framing device for Miéville’s polyphonic novel, which is much more philosophical and ruminative than its source material. That said, Miéville affirms, “I love an exciting, pulpy fight scene and it would be breach of promise not to have fun, pulpy, dramatic hyperviolence in this novel. But there’s also things you can do in the pace of a novel that are much harder to do with a comic.”

If you were to read BRZRKR and The Book of Elsewhere through the prism of Reeves’s acting career, you could see it as falling somewhere between the exhilarating ultraviolence of the John Wick series and the secret worlds and existential paranoia of The Matrix. Also, as scholars will no doubt ponder, it chimes with Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey – in which the protagonists get the better of Death by giving him a wedgie.

Especially, but not uniquely, in this version of the character, Unute’s existential predicament is also emotional. If you live for 80,000 years, how are you to relate to people who grow old and die in (for you) the blinking of an eye? Can an immortal be fully human? Can life, and the choices you make in life, be meaningful if it never ends?

Unute doesn’t want to die, but he does – desperately – want to be mortal: “there’s a difference”. And Unute is sterile: every child he has is stillborn. (There’s a special torque to this in knowing that Reeves had a stillborn child with his former partner, the actor Jennifer Syme – who later went on to die in a car accident. For all his good fortune, Reeves is acquainted with grief.) When they went back and forth on Miéville’s first draft in a series of Zoom meetings, Miéville says: “What I felt he was particularly perspicacious about was questions of character – which shouldn’t be a surprise because of the acting. But the way we talk about things structurally, and in terms of character, isn’t necessarily the same. We don’t come with the same vernacular.

“So there was a process where I had to learn to understand what was being put to me. I remember a couple of times when you were saying things about B, and I was like, I know I’m not getting what he’s saying. Then after a couple of goes around – oh, OK, I get it. And every time that happened – I can think of three times very particularly – I was, like, oh: he’s absolutely right.”

What have been Reeves’s influences as a reader? He rubs his hair and groans a little: “I mean, I’ve got some fuckin’ hobbits in my past,” he says.

“In your cupboard,” interjects Miéville.

“Yeah, I got some hobbits goin’ on there. I’m trying to remember some other ... I liked sci-fi. My early hormone years were kinda like: Frank Miller – Wolverine, Dark Knight. But then I also loved, like, Archies and so on. But when I first read Philip K Dick, or when I read William Gibson, or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you know, those were all like ... and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Animal Farm. You know, those kinds of fantasy novel ... I really liked that.”

Miéville is well known not just as a fantasy and SF writer, but also for his political work. His last published book, A Spectre, Haunting, was an essay on the Communist Manifesto. Did he convert his co-author to Marxism while they were writing the book? “I think it would be deeply gauche and rude of me to start haranguing him,” he says. “We haven’t talked too much politically.” “I’m not someone to speak politics,” says Reeves decisively. “I’m just terrible.”

What does Reeves make, I ask him nevertheless, of the way in which the metaphors of his Matrix movies have been co-opted by the “alt-right” with their talk of “red pills”? He looks a little pained. “Aaah,” he says. “It doesn’t sound that great to me?” Then: “But I don’t know. It’s art, right? So I don’t know. I mean, it’s like ... yeah. I guess people ... yeah. Take it and run with it ...”

In no great expectation of a straight answer, I ask the intrusive question. Is this a flat fee for Miéville, or shared royalties? “Hopefully,” says Reeves, “there’s royalties to share. Hopefully – which would mean that people enjoyed the work, or they bought it for some other reason. But whatever it is, hopefully they get something positive.”

If nothing else, Reeves himself got something positive. “I’m reading a BRZRKR China Miéville novel!” he says. “Yeah! What, what, what? And then like, why am I crying? Why am I feeling so much? And then what is that? And then? Wait, I need to like … what’s that fuckin’ word? Oh, yeah. Great.”

• The Book of Elsewhere is published by Del Ray (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.