Actor Keanu Reeves wrote his first book, and it is a really weird one

NEW YORK – Keanu Reeves does not know exactly where the idea came from.

But one day – sometime around the release of his action movie John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) and before he started shooting sci-fi sequel The Matrix Resurrections (2021) – he imagined a man who could not die.

“It became a series of what ifs,” said the Canadian actor and musician. “What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?”

From there, Reeves added: “It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow.”

For a while, the character existed only in his head. Then he wondered: What if this immortal warrior became the basis for a comic book? An action movie? An animated series?

“And then, there’s another what if,” he said. “What if it became a novel?”

Reeves’ ancient warrior has since become the anchor of a growing multimedia franchise.

The 2021 comic he imagined and co-wrote, BRZRKR (pronounced “berserker”), grew into a 12-issue series that has sold more than two million copies. A live-action film, starring and produced by Reeves, and an animated spin-off are in development at Netflix.

And now, he has released his debut novel, The Book Of Elsewhere, which he co-wrote with British science-fiction author China Mieville.

Set in the world of the BRZRKR comic, The Book Of Elsewhere is a mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction and mythology, with a heavy dose of existentialism.

To call it a weird book does not begin to capture its genre-defying, protean strangeness.

It centres on Reeves’ 80,000-year-old warrior – called Unute or sometimes B – who is freakishly strong, able to rip people’s arms off and punch through their chests, but has grown weary of his deathless state.

It is a pulpy, adrenaline-fuelled thriller, but it is also a moody, experimental novel about mortality, the slippery nature of time and what it means to be human.

At first, Reeves, 59, and Mieville, 51, might seem an odd pairing.

Reeves is an A-list Hollywood star, while Mieville is a Marxist who holds a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics.

He is known in literary circles for his heady, politically charged sci-fi and fantasy novels, among them Kraken (2010), which features a squid-worshipping cult, and Railsea (2012), set in a dystopian world that is covered in railroad lines and populated by giant naked mole rats, which is both a homage to Moby-Dick and a critique of modern capitalism.

But from another angle, the Reeves-Mieville partnership makes aesthetic, cultural and even philosophical sense.

Both pose mind-bending questions about the mysteries of existence in their work and often smuggle in those ideas through action-filled plots.

Reeves grew up devouring science fiction by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, and later came to love Mieville’s short stories, which he called “a wonder”.

Mieville, for his part, loves how in Reeves’ movies like The Matrix (1999) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), the actor was able to “combine propulsion with astonishing spectacle, with heretical philosophical provocation and investigation”.

In a joint video interview, Reeves, from his home in Los Angeles, and Mieville, in Berlin, both used the word “preposterous” to describe how surreal it felt to work with the other.

They spoke about their first meeting, in Berlin during the summer of 2021, in the giddy way a new couple talks about how they first got together.

At the meeting, Reeves told Mieville that apart from a couple of key plot points and character traits that had been established in the comic, Mieville could do what he liked with the source material.

Reeves’ openness convinced Mieville that he would be able to write something narratively interesting, and deliver a book that did not feel like comic-book merchandise or a tie-in.

“It was important for us to approach this in a way that did something new, that did something that was very specifically literary in the sense of using the novel and using the novel form, that nonetheless was unabashedly and joyfully a BRZRKR novel and that honours the source material,” Mieville said.

As for why he wanted to write a novel, and how his literary projects intersect with his film career, Reeves had an answer that he apologetically acknowledged was “so obvious and reductive”.

“It’s another version of storytelling, which I love,” said the multi-hyphenate, who will reunite with British-American actor Alex Winter, his co-star in the Bill & Ted sci-fi comedy film trilogy (1989 to 2020), for a Broadway revival of Waiting For Godot in 2025.

One of Reeves’ collaborators on the comic book series, Matt Kindt, has another theory about why the actor has invested so much in the warrior character.

He thinks Reeves, who has remained a rather enigmatic figure despite his decades in the spotlight, sees aspects of himself in the warrior – a figure who is worshipped and gains a cult-like following, but is lonely, treated as alien and burdened by other people’s misguided ideas about who he is.

“I could tell it was a very personal story,” Kindt said.

Reeves said he did not realise at first how much of himself he was putting into the warrior character, but he has since come to see how his metaphysical preoccupations shaped the story.

“It surprised me in the creative act, what gets revealed to oneself,” he said. “Maybe the creative act is a kind of talking, you know. And so maybe I have father issues and mother issues. And maybe I think about death.”

He continued: “Maybe I don’t understand the violence of the world. I don’t understand that we all know we’re going to die, and we kill each other over things that are, perhaps as you look back at them, not so important. Maybe I wonder about the world, you know, how did we get here, who are we.”

Reeves has other ideas for new works based on the character, including, possibly, an epic poem.

“Show business looks at it like, what else can we do, but I come at it from the artist’s side, like what else can we make,” Reeves said. “From the very beginning, I was hoping that other creators and artists could play, as China said, with the toys.”

He is not sure yet how the version of the character that Mieville developed in the novel will influence the comic and other projects going forward. But he is fairly certain it will surprise him.

“That’s to be revealed to me,” Reeves said. “There’s a lot to think about, what it can be and how it will affect the canon, as I go back and play with my own toys.” NYTIMES