The international career of Hollywood fixture Keanu Reeves is seemingly inseparable from his persona as a mixed-race and ethnically ambiguous actor. But his career, which is based on this trait, reveals that differences of race and nationality are “ultimately illusory” constructs, theater scholar Julian Cha argues.
When he began acting in the late 1980s, Reeves was the only Asian American leading man in Hollywood, Cha writes. Born in Lebanon, Reeves has Chinese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian parentage. He’s a citizen of three countries (the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) and has lived and worked across the world.
Reeves seldom discusses his ethnic heritage or transnational biography. Despite this, writes Cha, he “embodie[s] a vague ‘Asianness’ and a definite ‘Otherness’ onscreen.” He’s “a hybrid and transnational entity in the cultural imaginary,” able to “negotiate boundaries of race/ethnicity” while remaining a “racially and ethnically ambiguous” figure.
For Cha, Reeves not only represents “mobility across borders,” with his globe-trotting lifestyle, but also “personifies a melding and coalescence of races, ethnicities, and cultures.” Regardless of the role, Reeves “embodies this history that is mapped across his body,” writes Cha, examining the link between Reeves’s background and the characters he plays.
For instance, Reeves appeared in the 1993 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, playing the villainous Don John, brother to the heroic character, Don Pedro, played by the well-known Black actor Denzel Washington.
“If almost any other Caucasian or Asian actor were cast in the role of Don John,” Cha writes,
it might have had a nearly comical effect, and the entire relationship could be deemed unbelievable and utterly implausible. However, Reeves’s capacity to transcend borders of race/ethnicity allows him to portray the character with fewer eyebrows being raised and less incredulity, and he is perhaps the only “A-list” actor who indeed possesses this inherent knack for crossing these lines of race and ethnicity.
Of course, Reeves is perhaps most famous for playing Neo, the Christ-like hero of the Wachowski Sisters’ 1999 science-fiction classic The Matrix.
The Matrix tells the story of a programmer named Neo, who learns that he and most of humanity are living in the Matrix, an artificial simulation that enforces “hegemony and oppressive ideology.” When he becomes able to see the computer code that makes up the Matrix, Neo figuratively gains the power to comprehend the structure of societal oppression, according to Cha.
In this interpretation, the Matrix represents forces such as white supremacy. By defeating it, “Neo ushers in a new era of ‘post-ethnicity’ where ethnicities are hybridized and interrelated,” as part of a world “where the coalescence of races/ethnicities is the ideal by-product and ultimate goal.”
In particular, Cha calls attention to a fight between Neo and Hugo Weaving’s character, Agent Smith, who serves the Matrix (all the agents of the Matrix are played by white actors, notes Cha). In the process, Neo physically incorporates himself into Smith’s body.
“While embodying Smith, he begins to fracture and then explodes apart into fragments—a literal form of one of the effects of trafficking in ethnicity, fracturing the Eurocentric view of ethnic groups as one monolithic entity,” Cha explains. “As the face of ‘whiteness’ fragments and ruptures into numerous pieces, the face that remains is the face of hybridity and the melding of races and ethnicities in the form of Reeves.”
Through these elements, the role of Neo thus showcases “Reeves’s increasingly distinctive position in the industry as a hybrid identity who can ‘pass’ as white,” a facility that Cha argues is especially appropriate for a film that “stands as an ideal model for the concept of hybridity.”
Cha also reflects on Reeves’s rumored participation in a live-action adaptation of the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop, which takes place on a spaceship in the future. Cha considers the project as another example of Reeves’s ability to “pass,” not as white, but as Japanese.
“[F]ans of the series are cognizant of it as being a Japanese product,” Cha writes, and they will read Reeves as Japanese as well.
“Those with stereotypical perceptions of Asians all being the same and as a monolithic category will fail to see the complexity of a hybrid, transnational figure who passes as both white and Asian embodying a Japanese anime character,” Cha writes.
Though the project ultimately fell through, Cha speculates about the potential for “a multilayered performance” in Cowboy Bebop, where “Reeves brings life to a ‘Japaneseness’ or a Japanese national identity in a hybrid/transnational body in the borderless reaches of outer space.”
As its unfolded, Reeves’s career has “provide[d] new modes of thought concerning the category of ‘Asian-American’ and how transnationalism has altered this categorization,” Cha argues. That’s even as “his hybridity restructures outmoded ways of thinking and conceiving of race/ethnicity/culture and blurs the boundaries which separate these classifications.”
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