Keanu Reeves was deep in some narrow library stacks, wedged between biographies and Ph.D. theses, when — not for the first time that April afternoon — he started channeling one of Samuel Beckett’s most famous works. “Do you see me?” he said, standing tall with one hand outstretched and declaiming in the style of Estragon, from “Waiting for Godot.” “But do you see me?”
Beside him was Alex Winter, his friend of nearly four decades, the everlasting Bill to his most excellent Ted, ready to jump in and finish the thought. They had traveled to the University of Reading, in England, to tour its comprehensive Beckett archives, as they prepared to star this fall in “Waiting for Godot” on Broadway.
Reeves, who is making his Broadway debut playing the hapless Estragon, and Winter, as his more heady partner Vladimir, had already spent hours that sunny day examining manuscripts, poring over Beckett’s handwritten stage directions and looking at old photos. Most excitedly, they were juicing every possible detail out of James Knowlson, a twinkly-eyed 92-year-old Beckett biographer whose work is informed by his decades of friendship with the Nobel-winning Irish writer, who died in 1989. In the library, they covered Beckett’s connection with James Joyce (profound, and sometimes profane), his romantic relationships — “he was a bit of a philanderer, really,” Knowlson allowed — and his connection to God.
“Not as an intellectual,” Reeves said, searchingly. “But where did he land as a man?”
Winter observed: “So much of the emotion of the play comes from the torment of faith, or no faith.” (Beckett was “intensely spiritual,” Knowlson said.)
The scholarly and literary research was just one facet in Reeves’s and Winter’s yearslong training for a hot-ticket production, which begins previews on Sept. 13 at the Hudson Theater. (Opening night is set for Sept. 28.) They also studied clowning, and Butoh, and sought out actors from previous productions of “Godot,” including the nonagenarian Alan Mandell, who gave one of Beckett’s favorite performances.
“We’re not cavalier” about the undertaking, Winter said. “It’s not like, oh, we’re just going to go be awesome. It’s: Take it seriously, and do the work.” For more than a year, they have been meeting nearly monthly to read through the play together.
Since they bonded on the stoner classic “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” as 20-somethings in the late ’80s, Reeves and Winter have carved out different careers — Reeves as a brooding, blockbuster action star (“The Matrix” and “John Wick” series) and Winter as an indie actor, director and documentarian (“Zappa”).
But as a double act, they are unmistakably the stars of the three “Bill & Ted” comedies (“party on, dude!”), and reviving one of the most challenging, foundational masterpieces of 20th-century drama is a big swing. They may have made it bigger by enlisting the British hotshot director Jamie Lloyd, whose sleek adaptations of “A Doll’s House,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Evita” wowed huge audiences — in and out of the theater — and racked up awards on both sides of the Atlantic.
Comic artists have a long association with “Godot.” (Reeves saw the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater version with Robin Williams and Steve Martin.) The hope from these stars and the production’s creative team is that the casting helps make the material accessible; they want “Bill & Ted” fans storming Broadway. “The play can be treated with such academic reverence,” Winter said. “And you want to evaporate that.”
Then again, in Lloyd’s staging — or just in my cosmic thinking — there may be more commonality than you would expect between a pair of slacker friends who time travel via phone booth and Beckett’s mired-in-place scamps, yearning for liberation. We’ll get to that; wait.
For Lloyd, whose trademark is making grand minimalism out of typically maximalist theater, “Godot,” with its already-spare set (a road, a tree) and story, was mostly animated by the prickly but enduring relationship between Vladimir and Estragon. “For me, that’s what the play is all about,” Lloyd said. “That kind of companionship while staring into the void. The reliance on each other.”
A Palpable Connection
The project and the idea of reuniting with Winter came from Reeves. Or as he put it: “It came from the universe, and when it struck me it rang a gleeful bell, and so I asked him if he wanted to do it.”
Though the visual marketing for “Godot” emphasizes their lived-in visages (Winter is 60 and Reeves is 61), they retain a boyish — dude-ish — quality, and good (wild) hair.
Sitting at Reeves’s side for an interview after the library tour, Winter, neat in a white linen shirt and black jeans, was the more voluble of the two. “We were both old young people,” he said, explaining their immediate connection when they met 38 years ago. “Both into kind of brooding Schopenhauer and Dostoyevsky.” (They’re also both bassists.)
Reeves, who favors rumpled three-button suit jackets and composition notebooks (stylistically, he’s like a philosophy T.A.), would double fist-pump and nod vehemently in agreement with his friend. He was all kinetic energy and “Godot” preoccupation — unprompted, he enthusiastically mimed the scene in which Estragon struggles to pull on an ill-fitting boot.
Lloyd witnessed that too, the first time they met, in December 2022, at Babbo, the Italian restaurant in the West Village, when they were still trying to keep the project quiet. “It was just a very surreal moment, seeing Bill and Ted staring at me across an appetizer,” he said. Reeves did the boot bit, “kind of like falling on the floor,” he recalled, “and I was thinking, God, in this tiny restaurant — everyone’s looking, there’s Keanu Reeves acting out Beckett. And Alex looked at him with such love and fondness and patience and just real kindness. I just thought that their connection was so palpable, right from that first meeting.”
Ed Solomon, who wrote the “Bill & Ted” movies with Chris Matheson, said that he was struck by how gracefully Winter and Reeves worked together, even on the 2020 installment, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” which came 29 years after the sequel “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.” Onscreen and off, “there’s a buoyancy and a generosity of spirit” between them, he said, that audiences can feel.
Their friendship is legit — brotherly, in Winter’s words. They’ve had Thanksgiving and Christmas together; they use each other as sounding boards for other projects; they tear through the canyons of Los Angeles on their motorcycles — “the real deal riding,” Solomon said, “hugging curves with their knees low to the ground.” So their appetite for risk is similar, too.
Ever the daredevil, Reeves even floated that they should switch roles throughout the “Godot” run. Winter, who performed in “Peter Pan” and other Broadway shows as a child, and knew the rigors of the eight-show-a-week schedule, nixed that idea. (They initially read both parts for Lloyd, before settling on the current casting.)
For Reeves, who said he’d had some lines from the play (“Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot”) rattling around his head since he was 18, it was Winter as a professional, and not just as a friend, that made the pairing kismet. “The artist that he is and the artist that I can hopefully be, working together,” he said. “I feel kinship.”
‘A Canonical Theory’
As meager as it is in plot, “Waiting for Godot” is a humanity-encompassing piece of theater: It is about death and yes, kinship; anger, fear and hope; futility and the search for meaning. (Beckett billed “Godot” as a tragicomedy. It was last on Broadway in the 2013-14 season, with Patrick Stewart as Vladimir and Ian McKellen as Estragon. This revival’s cast includes Brandon J. Dirden as the pompous interloper Pozzo and Michael Patrick Thornton as his slave Lucky.)
“Bill & Ted” is obviously not all that.
And yet.
Watching “Face the Music,” in which our heroes are middle-aged and stuck, I could not help but see the Beckettian parallels.
This is, as Winter said when I described it to him later, “a canonical theory.”
United in youth by a circumstance they can’t fully understand or control, Bill and Ted are forever joined together. But circa “Face the Music,” their lives haven’t advanced as they imagined; they’re scraping for a way out, waiting — you might see where this is going — to connect with a near mythical creation they can’t quite grasp. (In their case it’s a rock song that will save the world; the Gen X version of a deus ex machina.) Meanwhile, space and time — the world order as they know it! — is in danger of collapsing. The movie, Solomon said, “has a deep underlying sadness.”
Still, even as Bill and Ted traverse decades, meeting (spoiler) worse and worse versions of themselves, they retain a sort of certitude, that they must go on.
Also?
Their speech is paired, and repetitive, like the encircling dialogue in the play. And their whole physical vibe is sort of clownish, as some of the most critically beloved interpretations of “Godot” are.
Lloyd caught it before I even brought it up: The “Bill & Ted” movies, he said, “have that kind of vaudevillian rhythm, the pingpong of it all — I pass one thought to you and you pass it back to me.” It matched, he said, “the rhythm and the melody of the play.”
Solomon said Beckett had not been a reference point for the movies’ writers. (“We thought about [Ingmar] Bergman a little bit in ‘Bogus Journey,’” he said, “but not very deeply.”) Still, he could see it. Both stories lean into the absurd, and “there’s, like, grappling with mortality and existence,” he said.
But Reeves and Winter regarded me with suspicion when I spilled my thoughts, in a Manhattan rehearsal room in early August. I swear, I said, I was not stoned when I came up with this.
Reeves, grinning: “What’s wrong with being stoned? Or any thought that comes from being stoned? Ideas are all good ideas, as far as I’m concerned.”
A Wide Span of Creativity
What was indisputable, for this production, is the historical origin of Beckett’s story, which the stars and Lloyd dug into with Knowlson, the biographer. The work is underpinned by brutality: “The first lines we say to each other are, ‘Who beat you? I’m amazed you’re alive,’” noted Winter, paraphrasing the text.
Knowlson told them: “I just hope that your production has the right balance of humor and violence,” Winter added. “And we were like, ‘Yes!’” (Reeves: fist pump.)
Estragon and Vladimir are refugees from some unnamed conflict. But a lot of the descriptions and themes echo Beckett’s experiences in France during World War II, when he and his wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, were members of the French Resistance, and narrowly evaded the Gestapo. (The play was originally written in French.)
Estragon and Vladimir’s famish, their fixation on a homely root vegetable, the turnip — that mirrored the hunger the couple and their community went through. To survive, Beckett worked for a time as a farmhand. “Stomping grapes, the red country, that’s all out of their escape from Paris,” Winter said. “The idea of two people surviving in a dystopian, oligarchic, fascistic thing” — that was their real life. Performing it now, “all of that is really, really timely.”
On the archive tour, they studied Beckett’s handwriting, which was either urgently flowy or “tormented in its precision,” Winter observed. And — as plenty have done before them — they debated how to actually pronounce Godot. (They landed on GOD-oh.)
Joining them was Alexandra Grant, an artist and Reeves’s partner, who was thrilled to discover Beckett’s drawings and songwriting, the wide span of his creativity. She snapped photos of some of the books.
Winter, a father of three, is married to Ramsey Ann Naito, the president of Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Animation; he has directed movies for Cartoon Network. “I’m a zig-zagger,” he said of his career. His latest film, the dark comedy “Adulthood,” which stars Josh Gad and Billie Lourd, will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this month. Winter “finds comedy in the depths of human imperfection and the unmitigated chaos of life (and death),” Gad wrote in an email. “He is far too curious as an artist to simply settle for ever being one thing.” This fall, Winter is also a producer of an Off Broadway production of the Naomi Wallace drama “Slaughter City,” which is making its New York debut.
Reeves, whose noncinematic projects include a sci-fi fantasy book series, is also involved with indie theater: For more than a decade he has been a supporter and board member of the Bushwick Starr, the influential alt-performance space in Brooklyn. “The way that he approaches his relationship to a small theater like ours is just with a lot of care and conscientiousness and a great understanding for the work that we’re doing,” said Sue Kessler, a co-founder and creative director of the space. “He grew up in Toronto in theaters like ours.”
When Reeves M.C.’d an event there some years back, “he literally helped clean up at the end of the night, that’s the kind of guy he is,” added Noel Allain, the other co-founder and artistic director.
A Lot at Stake
When I caught up with Reeves and Winter in their first week of rehearsal in New York, they were still quoting the play to each other. (“We’re speaking Godot, at this point,” Winter said.) Reeves’s preoccupied energy was replaced by palpable excitement: He had wanted this for so long. “Exploration. Investigation. Collaboration,” he said, in Godot.
“Recreation,” Winter chimed in, laughing. A couple of bowler hats lay on the table behind them.
With Lloyd at the helm, this will not, of course, look like the usual “Waiting for Godot.”
“The scenic design will be probably unlike any other production,” Lloyd said. “But it’s very true to the instructions that are written in the text.”
No video — another Lloyd trademark — but there was a large wooden structure in the space, which Reeves asked me not to reveal. (In his notebook, he delightedly wrote down all the names people came up with for it.)
The physical toll was already apparent for Winter, who said he started “hard-core cardio” training for this two years ago. (The biggest mistake screen actors make coming to the stage, he said, “is not understanding the physical demands.”) Even for Reeves, the erstwhile action star, Broadway endurance and recovery is next level. “I have been thinking, like, hmm, how can I get a cold plunge in my room?” he said.
But the emotional stakes are also heavy. Even when they were just reading the text, Winter told me, some lines about their togetherness will make him “flash to being in Rome with Keanu in, like, 1987,” he said, “and the weight of what has happened since then.” There was adulthood, the tribulations of their industry, personal traumas. He grew teary. “It’s a play about survival, at the end of the day,” he said.
The Beckettian philosophies of endurance — “Fail again. Fail better” and “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” — were encapsulated in a play where the leads are actively contemplating death.
Winter said: “This notion of soldiering on — and without knowing, right? — is really beautiful. Harrowing, but beautiful. And we’ve got to do that every night.”
And Reeves: “It’s difficult, it’s fun, it pays, it has commitment, it asks a lot, it demands a lot — and it’s so good that it does,” he said. “We are lucky today.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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