A few months ago, Keanu Reeves turned 40 and understandably found himself reflecting on his life and speculating about the future. To an outsider, perhaps, this would be a cause for celebration; a chance for Reeves to crack open the Cristal to toast his own incredible success. After all, what more could he possibly wish for? He has fame, acclaim and fabulous wealth, good looks, health and enjoys membership of that exclusive club of actors which allows him to pick and choose the very best scripts Hollywood can provide. But for Reeves, this landmark provoked only a soul-searching reappraisal of his life which took him close to depression. "It was a nightmare," he says. "It reminded me of adolescence and it felt like an internal transformation with a physical aspect, like when your hormones run wild. But this time with a conscious shift, an awareness of your own mortality."
On the surface, Reeves is the embodiment of the Hollywood dream: boy from Toronto arrives in Los Angeles and struggles to get work before breaking into the big time playing, very convincingly, a slacker dude (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), then hits pay dirt as a beefed-up action hero (Speed), before moving into the celebrity stratosphere via The Matrix trilogy which made him a reported $80 million and turned him into one of the biggest stars on the planet.
But it doesn't take a therapist to work out why there is an air of sadness that is as much a part of Reeves as his floppy, jet-black hair or his dark-brown eyes. His is a story both of fabulous success ("I know how lucky I am, I really do," he says) and terrible tragedy. Estranged from his father as a youngster, his personal life since has been marked by pain and loss. His younger sister, Kim, has been fighting leukaemia for several years, and he grieved over the loss of a much-wanted daughter who was stillborn in 1999. The baby's mother, his former girlfriend Jennifer Syme, subsequently died in a car accident some two years after losing their baby.
Such awful events - and there have been more - would be enough to make anyone question how you can be given so much and yet have so much more taken away. It's no wonder, then, that, at 40, Reeves finds himself pondering the meaning of it all. "Maybe it happens to some people a little bit later," he says of his mid-life crisis. "But for me it was the grief, the loss of half a life - because I guess that's what it is - and that's a transition. And understanding mortality forces you to ask those big questions: What have I done? And where am I? It's just something that happened to me, and going through it wasn't pretty. There's been lots of soul-searching and all the other stuff, too... but at least I didn't buy the sports car."
Arguably the most unconventional superstar of the lot, Reeves sharply divides opinion over his acting ability. Some critics, and even some of his peers, have accused him of being wooden, saying he's best when, rather than a nuanced performance, what is required is an impressive physical presence, such as in Speed, as the driver of a runaway bus with a terrorist bomb on board, or in the balletic Matrix films as a high-kicking freedom fighter. Put him up against Al Pacino, as a young lawyer who sells his soul in The Devil's Advocate, and, for some, he's found wanting. Yet he's clearly capable of more than just providing athletic eye candy - he was very good alongside Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in the romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give. And one of his best early performances was in My Own Private Idaho as a male hustler opposite the doomed River Phoenix.
Reeves has never been content to fit into a convenient box. Action stars don't usually start out playing gay prostitutes. And leading Hollywood players are meant to live in a big Bel Air mansion with a fleet of flash cars in the driveway - all of which he could easily afford. Reeves doesn't even have his own home, preferring instead to stay in a succession of hotels, or with friends and family.
He's a bit of a drifter, a new-age soul who starts the day with a Buddhist ceremony to ward off evil spirits and likes to ride his 1974 Norton Commando along the Pacific Coast Highway. He's crashed it eight times so far, and has admitted that he mostly likes to ride without a helmet, which is against the law in California. "Anyone can drive Mulholland Drive without a helmet - it's not getting caught that's the thing," he says, deadpan.
Today, the Norton has been left in the garage, and his impressively honed 6ft 1in frame, upholstered in a midnight black suit of the finest quality, is at the centre of a hive of activity designed to promote his latest film, Constantine, a darkly humorous comic-book thriller in which he plays a kind of rock'n'roll exorcist who has big issues with God and smokes far too much. In fact, he seems to have a ciggie dangling from his mouth in every scene. "I smoked loads. Lots of takes, don't forget. I really do have to give up."
Reeves is unfailingly polite, but sometimes monosyllabic and withdrawn. There are times when interviewing him is a bit like listening to dialogue from the second or third Matrix films - where the machines (which look like giant calamari) scramble all over the place trying to exterminate humankind, and Neo - that's Reeves - as our only hope for salvation, spouts lines that sound quite profound on first hearing, but don't really bear up to scrutiny.
A fairly innocuous opening query about whether he enjoys acting as much these days as he did when he was starting out back home in Toronto, draws this answer: "I think through experience one gains facility, and what interests us as young men and older men changes. And just like any kind of material or craftsmanship, writing or acting, whatever, the performing arts as well as the plastic arts, I think with facility and knowledge of craft comes a deepening and richening of what you are interested in and capable of doing."
But mostly he comes across as a rather charming oddball, a bit of a loner, awkward and perhaps even a little shy. This deadpan rambling may even be a bit of an act; a way of keeping nosy journalists at bay. Rachel Weisz, his co-star in Constantine, who has known him for ten years since they worked together on the thriller Chain Reaction, hints at as much. "We're both a little older and a little wiser," she says. "But in essence he's the same as when I first met him. He is actually very down-to-earth. His private life is very private; he has real friends, a real life. He's a real guy."
When I ask what she likes most about Reeves, she pauses to consider. "There's something just a little quirky about him," she smiles. "I think that's what makes him interesting. He is very enigmatic. Actually, he's very unknowable."
