The incredible, ageless Reeves: aging celebrity, aging fans, and nostalgia

ABSTRACT

As a star, Keanu Reeves is timeless. As a celebrity, ageless. Drawing on Jerslev and Petersen’s (eds, 2018) special issue of Celebrity Studies, this article reads Reeves’ star image through the lens of research on ageing celebrities, and ageing fans. While his iconic action roles centre Reeves as an ageing, yet ageless celebrity, the memeification of Reeves has been essential to his resurgent star image with younger fans. As a star notoriously private about his personal life, Reeves’ first public appearance with partner Alexandra Grant in November 2019, and the subsequent shock at the ‘age appropriate’ pairing (rather than the more common image of ageing male star, much younger starlet) added another layer to the discourse around ageing male stars. Finally, Reeves’ reprisal of his role as Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan in Bill and Ted Face the Music (BATFTM) (2020) speaks both to his age/lessness and star image, in addition to the nostalgia of his ageing fans. In sum, this paper will interrogate Reeves’ star image as an atypical representation of ageing celebrity masculinity – and how this contributes to his ongoing appeal to ageing fans.

KEYWORDS:

• Keanu Reeves
• ageing
• celebrity
• fandom
• nostalgia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. At 59 years old, Tom Cruise provides an intriguing counterpoint to Reeves. While also escaping the ‘geriaction’ tag to date, and continuing to perform his own stunts in the Mission Impossible franchise, in 2019 he was released from the Jack Reacher franchise by author Lee Child, who stated Cruise was ‘too old for this stuff’ (Hicks 2019).

2. This decision resulted in Reeves being placed in ‘movie jail’ [being blacklisted] by Fox; he didn’t appear in another Fox film for a decade, in The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) (Pappademas 2019).

3. Although critics such as Horner (2019) have argued that The Matrix is reflective of late 1990s anxieties around millennial postmodern identity, the forthcoming sequel Matrix 4 (2021) promises to offer further potential for interpretation in terms of Reeves’ ageless/action persona.

4. Although Johnny Silverhand is killed in Cyberpunk 2077, his psyche is stored in digitised form (known as an engram) in a biochip called The Relic, thus rendering him immortal (Cyberpunk Wiki 2021).

5. Until arguably the release of The Matrix (1999); such was the cultural impact of the franchise that he became at least as well known for his role as Neo.

6. As mentioned above, Reeves appears in the Cyberpunk 2077 game, and owns his own motorcycle manufacturing company, Arch Motorcycles.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Renée Middlemost

Renée Middlemost is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on fan participation, celebrity, and popular culture, and has been featured in collections such as The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema; Crank It Up: Jason Statham - Star!; and Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture. Her recent work has been published in journals including Celebrity Studies, M/C Journal, and the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. She is the co-founder of the Fan Studies Network Australasia, and a co-editor of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies.