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‘I wanted to do pulpy, hyper-violent action’: Keanu Reeves on his novel with China Miéville and the afterlife of The Matrix

What happens when a Hollywood actor and SF author join forces on a novel? The pair talk about their literary bromance – and their quest to turn Reeves’s comic book series into something deeper

Reeves started his acting career at the age of nine, and has starred in a string of era-defining movies – from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Point Break, the Matrix series and the John Wick films. Photograph: David Lee/Thunder Road Pictures/AllstarBRZRKRsold a ton, and it’s a very comic-booky sort of comic book: a lot of kinetic Frank Miller-style ultraviolence, with ripped-out spines and torn-off jaws and skulls punched into blobs of red mist studded with flying teeth. One of Unute’s marriages breaks up after the 1648 Peace of Münster, for instance, and when I say I think there’s something of Charles Maturin’s 1820 Melmoth the Wandererin Miéville’s version of the character he starts waggling his index finger up and down, which, he explains, “I picked up from my brother-in-law: it’s apparently what people in his area of Mexico do when they strongly agree with you.”

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