Matrix Resurrections: Fighting Keanu Reeves is Like Making Love, Says Jonathan Groff. Jonathan Groff plays Agent Smith, the villain from the original trilogy brought to life by Hugo Weaving.
The Matrix trilogy (Matrix Resurrections), controversial as the second and third installments were, marked an era, and almost twenty years after the last film hit theaters, we will have the opportunity to see what happened to our favorite characters in the fourth part of the saga, Matrix Resurrections. The film will bring us back several well-known characters, some played by the same actors, and others by new actors. What it will also bring (as it is a hallmark of the franchise), are martial arts fights and a lot of action. You may also be interested: Matrix Resurrections: Trinity’s legacy is the deconstruction of oppressive female roles, says Eréndira Ibarra.
In Matrix Resurrections, there will be Agent Smith again, that villain who was played by Hugo Weaving in the original trilogy, this time the person in charge of bringing him to life will be Jonathan Groff, known for his role in the Netflix series Mindhunter. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actor talked about what the process of filming the fight scenes with Keanu Reeves was like, and what director Lana Wachowski was asking of him.
“Lana would tell me, ‘If you could open your palm and put your finger just under Keanu’s eyeball and then smash his face against the wall, that would be great for the camera.’ I look at Keanu and he nods at me as if to say ‘go ahead. And the trust! I mean, I have to go around in a circle, slap it on the face, and then smash it against the thing. I feel that there is a lot of love and respect that is exchanged in those moments.”
Despite the rudeness of that scene that Groff mentions, the actor learned an important lesson from working with Keanu, as Keanu taught him how to film a fight with great respect and consideration for the other, and Groff compared it to making love:
“It taught me a lot about the agreement of two people to hit each other but not hurt each other. It’s like making love to someone. When our fight ended, I felt deeply connected to him in a physical way.”
Reeves is known for his tireless commitment to stunts, many of which he performs himself, but he is also known for being very kind and treating everyone well, which has caused him to gain more and more fans throughout the years. years. While his career was stalled for almost a decade after appearing in Constantine, the John Wick franchise, started in 2015 with Another Day To Kill, catapulted him back to fame.
Weaving’s absence as Smith is not solely due to a creative decision, but because the actor had a conflict with his schedule, as he made it known in an interview with Coming Soon carried out last year, where he also expressed that he did not all the ideas in Matrix Resurrections sounded good to him:
“I thought we could have done my scenes in May, June, and July; and we talked about money … they were negotiating, and we were all pretty tidy and we agreed on dates and everything was fine, but then Lana decided she didn’t think it would work. So, she cut off the negotiations. That’s where it ended. Basically, I didn’t feel that my commitment to the National Theater was going to fit the dates I had in mind for me. In a way, it was a shame that he couldn’t be with all of them in Berlin, but that was his decision.”
Matrix Resurrections will be released in theaters this December 22, and in the United States, it will have a simultaneous launch in theaters and HBO Max. In addition to Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, Jada Pinkett Smith as Niobe and Lambert Wilson as Merovingian is back.
