John Wick Star Keanu Reeves Has Clause in His Contract Forbidding Digital Manipulation of His Performances

Keanu Reeves is one actor who is definitely NOT embracing the new era of actors being digitally de-aged onscreen. In fact, Reeves has gone so far as to make it legally prohibited for anyone to digitally manipulate his image! 

Reeves was doing an interview with his John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski – the premise of which was how the duo has grown one of the biggest blockbuster action brands right now – without leaning too heavily on technology and digital VFX. Naturally, that conversation veered into the lane of how Reeves is so particular about the use of technology in the film that he made it a contractual sticking point. 

After confirming that his contract clause about digital manipulation exists, Keanu Reeves explained that “I don’t mind if someone takes a blink out during an edit. But early on, in the early 2000s, or it might have been the ’90s, I had a performance changed. [He won’t say which.] They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, “Huh?!” It was like, I don’t even have to be here.”

The conversation progressed into the subject of modern times, and the technologies that allow things like deepfakes to exist. Doing projects like The Matrix movies (which used subtantial new film technology to tell a story about the dangers of tech) left Reeves with an acute awareness and healthy trepidation of how film technology gets used: 

“What’s frustrating about that [deepfakes] is you lose your agency,” Reeves explained. “When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, and sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much ‘data’ on behaviors now. Technologies are finding places in our education, in our medicine, in our entertainment, in our politics, and how we war and how we work.”

The deepfake technology has put Hollywood in its crosshairs first and foremost, as “fans” have used the tech to effectively copy and paste actors’ faces or entire likenesses over other performances. The situation has gotten even darker as deepfaking has inevitably crossed over into the adult entertainment industry. As Keanu Reeves said, an entertainer loses all agency when a deepfake can make them do some really… “off-brand” things that some people are convinced are real. 

John Wick: Chapter 4 will be released in theaters on March 24th.