Keanu Reeves will return in the lead role for John Wick 4.
The John Wick series kicked off in 2014, it is a neo-noir action thriller film directed by Chad Stahelski and written by Derek Kolstad.
Specifically, the John Wick storyline was inspired by an incident in Texas involving former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who wrote Lone Survivor, about his fireteam’s ordeal during Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan in 2005. Luttrell was given a yellow Labrador puppy, whom he named DASY, after the members of his fireteam.
However, Keanu Reeves has since owned the role and turned it into an iconic one.
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According to screenwriter Kolstad, it was Reeves himself “who got his talons into [the script] and made it his own.” “The Matrix” actor loved the script so much that he overhauled the character so that he could play him.
“I spent two months at Keanu’s house on the weekends working on the script,” Kolstad says in the book.
“When I first went and met with him and walked into his house, and as he rounded the corner to say hello to me — it’s a nice house, it’s not ostentatious for a guy who’s worth, I dunno, billions — and I look in his office, I see he has 300 screenplays stacked on his desk, because he reads everything that UTA, WME, William Morris sends out. He reads them all.”
Kolstad continued, “He read [the script] on a Friday, in 90 minutes, and was like, ‘I want to do it.’ In that moment, before I met and really clicked with him, I was like, ‘Yeah, I really want to do it, too.’ The first thing that Keanu said to me was, ‘Okay, Derek, I’m going to play him 35.’ And I’m like, ‘Fine.’”
“They Shouldn’t Have Killed His Dog,” written by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, will be published on Tuesday. Reeves, meanwhile, will return as John Wick in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” opening March 23, 2023 from Lionsgate.
