Doin' Time on Planet Keanu

Okay, okay, I remember, Keanu: "Don't put me on the rack." So, I'm guessing it might be about time to talk up something serious, like his Alex Winter-directed opus, Hideous Mutant Freekz. Is it a comedy? Drama? What? Suddenly, Reeves turns chummy again, sweetly spacey.

"Well, I worked in it for eight days with Alex, Tom Stern [Winter's co-writer and co-director] his partner, and Tim, I don't know Tim's last name--sorry, Tim!" he says, cupping a hand over his mouth, the other over his heart. It turns out that I do know Tim's last name, but just as I'm about to help him out, Reeves is rolling again. "Are you familiar with Alex's 'Idiot Box' on MTV? His comedy is physical, dark, usually social commentary; I guess the base of it is bitterness at original sin, at the spit and shit of man. It's Alex's first film and he plays a successful actor who's full of himself and gets hired by this company to push all these different products. The company suits are going, 'We want you to represent all these things,' and he's like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' so then they say, 'We want you to represent this chemical, Zygrot 24,' and he goes, 'No way, I heard that stuff was poisonous.' But when they work up to, 'Five million?' he goes: 'Okay!'

"So, he goes to this make-believe Central American place called Santa Flan and there's protesters, then him and this biased American girl hook up. He buys a crutch, clothing and bandages so that he can disguise himself as a cripple, and they stop at this freak show where Randy Quaid, the freakmaster, captures them and rubs on him this poisonous Zygrot stuff that he was going to represent. It turns him into a half-beast, half-normal guy, Beast Boy. And I play Ortiz the Dogboy, the leader of the freaks in this house of freaks. I had canine teeth and makeup and got to play him--" he explains, bounding from his seat, opening his mouth wide, flinging out his arms, and bellowing out a resounding "Aaaahhhhhhh!" that makes me wonder if Ortiz the Dogboy is related somehow to Tarzan, the Ape Man. "Muy macho, man," he says, settling down. "I based my character upon Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Tom Jones."

As for the $50 million Francis Coppola costume epic, Bram Stoker's Dracula, there's no doubt who Reeves based his character on, since it's the latest film version of the . Stoker novel. Reeves listens while I tell him how amused I've been by the preview trailers, especially by that radical wig on Gary Oldman that makes his vampiric Transylvanian bloodsucker look like a wacky combo out of Hellraiser meets "Wild Kingdom" meets The Golem. Reeves seizes onto the word "golem," repeating it as if tasting it, digging its sound.

"You mean like Gollum from Lord of the Rings?" he asks, laughing.

"No," I explain, "a golem like from that groovy German silent horror movie, a Frankenstein precursor, where the monster looks like some weird, stone gingerbread man."

"Has that ever happened to you, man," Reeves asks, rocking gently back and forth, "when you're just in the world, you know, hanging out, you're in your car and blah, blah, blah, you just look at someone and they look at you and you just feel they're evil? Or they have, like, a golem in them?" Actually, I tell Reeves, it's happened just about any time I'm within spitting distance of Hollywood--and that derails our Drac-chat a bit longer because it gets us both going on the subject of the L.A. uprisings that followed the "not guilty" verdict of the cops who hammered Rodney King.

"'Not guilty' was ludicrous, man," Reeves snaps. "Ludicrous is a stupid word, I mean, it was a crime. The voice of reason means the fist of action and, hopefully, that will be the case. Things are very heavy now. We're so many people so close together, there's got to be a harmony. I'm not very active in politics, but it's something that's been awakening. I'm not supporting any local politicians and I couldn't tell you who the head of the CIA is. I know the governor of California is Pete Wilson, right?"

Reeves has a way to go before he's stumping for Rock the Vote--he's still a Canadian citizen, anyway--but I'm curious about what he did while L.A. burned.

"I rode my bike around the first night. I saw some major shopping going on, 100 percent discount shopping. The second night, I had to pick up a friend around 12:30 at night and the air was electrified. It felt lawless. Like a Western town where no one wore their badges on the outside. Guns everywhere." Shaking his head at the sheer heaviness of it all, Reeves adds, "Some people don't like to feel that they're in the same boat with you. They'd like to have more room in the ocean and pick their teeth with your bones. So, it's pretty much a situation of, 'Get the golem! Get the golem!'"

And that old golem leads us back to Dracula. I throw caution to the wind and ask Reeves whether anyone's ever told him how ineffably of-this-exact-second he comes off when he does period movies, whether it's the Shakespeare rant in My Own Private Idaho, the '50s setting of Tune In Tomorrow..., or the 18th century of Dangerous Liaisons.

"Really?" Reeves asks, intent on pursuing this. "You mean, it was so obvious that when you watched, say, Dangerous Liaisons, you thought, 'This actor is not comfortable,' and it pulled you out of the film?" He leans forward. I tell him yes. There's a long, long pause. He finally flashes me a good-natured grin and says, "Yeah, well--on Dangerous Liaisons, for example, they only gave me my shoes on the first day of shooting. I guess that's symbolic of the whole thing."

Nevertheless, under Coppola's guidance, Reeves is doing the foppish, strike-a-mannered-pose thing again. The director, Reeves says, views his character, Harker, as "the first yuppie," whereas Reeves explains that he sees himself playing "the perfect Victorian gentleman." I ask Reeves if he'd mind conjuring up for us the qualities of the much speculated-over, much rumored-about Dracula. Reeves lets forth at once with a freewheeling spin of free association: "Vampires, submission, domination, rape, bestiality, guilt, Biblical overtones, Satan, God, Christian motifs, the dead, undead, blood, murder, revenge, opera, classicism and oral sex." Dandy, but why a big, expensive Dracula movie, after so many other big, expensive ones--not to mention so many little, cheap ones?

"Well, this is another day, another story and you've got Coppola's passion, and when you have that, you have something that is going to be ... extraordinary. I think Coppola's got something to say, he's got a vision, a reason to do this. Making it, he wanted all of us to go more and more out there, to be extraordinary and adventurous like he was being with the camera and with the film's look. You know, sometimes the rest of us couldn't keep up, but, with those other actors-- I mean, Richard Grant, Cary Elwes, Tom Waits, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, Sadie Frost--Coppola made me feel I could fly. Francis brings joy to his work. I take that back: he brings joy, period." Reeves leans over and says into the microphone of my tape recorder, "Thank you, Francis, you gave me some of the best times of my life and, hopefully, I played Harker well."

While we're on the subject, does Reeves have any favorite vampire flicks? "In school, I really dug the silent film Nosferatu, with Dracula's long fingers and the shadows and all that interplay. And, of course, in Vampire's Kiss, Nicolas Cage was rocking, shocking, brilliant. Radical."

Radical, too, says Reeves, was the experience of doing a particular scene with Coppola directing him on a visit to Gary Oldman's Transylvanian castle--a business call, since Reeves plays an ambitious, idealistic young British lawyer. "We were doing a scene where Dracula and Harker, my character, are signing the deeds for the properties in London. I was jazzed. It's like what the leader of our band, Greg, calls 'the X factor,' when everything goes right. That scene with Gary in Dracula was something. I'd put that up there with working with Crispin [Glover] in River's Edge--that, also, was a beautiful marriage of writing, story, directing, and Crispin just held me to that film--or I'd say it was on a par with working with River [Phoenix] in My Own Private Idaho--he's beautiful, inventive, funny and creative, too."

Speaking of Gus Van Sant's art movie about the relationship between a pair of street hustlers, did it gall Reeves that some of his fans beat it for the exits during the movie's more homoerotic interludes? "Every actor has his own battles," he observes, quietly, "and mine right now is coming from being a younger man trying to get more mature parts in cool films. Idaho is an example of 'Keanu moving on,' you know, a really cool part in a really great film. I heard some people in theaters were going nuts, just losing it, but I'm glad they were doing it not out of boredom. As long as they were confronted and challenged, then it's worth it."

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