Keanu Reeves can now add "book author" to a resume including bullet time expert, bounty hunter and bass player, having worked with a sci-fi novelist to pen the story of an 80,000-year-old warrior who cannot die.
Reeves partnered with British science fiction author China Miéville to write debut novel The Book of Elsewhere, which a New York Times profile of the two characterizes as a "mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction and mythology, with a heavy dose of existentialism."
The story is set in the world of Reeves's BRZRKR comic, a 12-issue series that sold more than two million copies and has both a live-action film and animated spinoff in development, with Reeves starring in and producing the former.
The actor told The Times how the idea snowballed sometime around the release of John Wick: Chapter 2, and before he began shooting The Matrix Resurrections. Imagining a man who couldn't die, he explained, "It became a series of what ifs."
"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? It went from this simple premise and gained in complexity and continued to grow."
Why a novel? Reeves answered, "It's another version of storytelling, which I love."
Reeves shared how he's come to realize that much of himself influenced the warrior character, explaining, "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.
"I wonder about technology. I wonder about this kind of extinction motive that it seems the species has. I don't know why we're in such a rush to get off the planet and become digitized. Maybe I wonder about love. And the power of it. Why is death so strong and love so frail, and yet it's the strongest force on the planet?"
The Book of Elsewhere arrives July 23, and to celebrate, Reeves and Miéville will take part in a virtual conversation about how they were inspired by the world of BRZRKR, their writing process, partnership and more.
Further details can be found via the book's official website.