There are a lot of actors who understandably leave dangerous on-set stunts to professionals, not wanting to risk getting badly injured, but Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise are in a class of their own. Though the latter is 60 years old and the former is 58, they both not only star in extreme action films, but they throw themselves (quite literally) into their performances. I recently made this comparison while sitting down with Reeves during the Los Angeles press day for director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 4, and his response was tremendously humble as he expressed an awe at what Cruise has done in the Mission: Impossible and Top Gun movies.
Expressing some extreme humility, Keanu Reeves likened his heavily choreographed, skilled, and dynamic work in the John Wick movies to being akin to “playing in the mud” compared to what Tom Cruise has done – alluding to the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and the actor piloting jets in Top Gun: Maverick. Having already lauded the legendary skills of Jackie Chan earlier in the interview, Reeves said,
What Tom Cruise does is extraordinary and special and something that... Again, another legend in another universe. I'm more like on the ground playing in the mud and he's like flying and jumping and outside of buildings and helicopters, fighter jets. So what he's doing in terms of the events that he's participating in, I think is extraordinary. And his passion for it, his skill, his talent just shines.
Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise have had parallel careers; they’ve never been in a movie together, but have both been working in Hollywood since the early 1980s. Both have big action hits and franchise across multiple decades of their respective filmographies, and nothing is slowing them down in the 2020s. Reeves does some of the most intense and insane stunt work ever in John Wick: Chapter 4, and we’re now just a few months away from seeing Cruise ride a motorcycle off of a cliff in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (which will be exclusively in theaters on July 14).
Continuing, Reeves grouped himself with regular movie-goers as being “beneficiaries” of what Cruise accomplishes in his big screen adventures. After all, one comparison he does accept between himself and the Top Gun: Maverick star is that they both really love film and what they do:
I think we're just the beneficiaries of his excellence, you know? And he's inspiring. And I think one thing I could say is that I share, as you spoke about, the passion for movies. We're lucky to be there and we're just trying to have fun and hope people like what we did.
Audiences are definitely going to like what Keanu Reeves has done most recently, as John Wick: Chapter 4 has been getting extremely positive buzz in the run-up to its theatrical release. Featuring a stellar supporting cast including Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Ian McShane, Rina Sawayama, and Scott Adkins, the movie will be in theaters everywhere on March 24.
To learn about more films heading to the big screen in the coming weeks and months, check out our 2023 Movie Release Calendar.
