Keanu Reeves On Sad Keanu
Keanu Reeves was honored with an excellence in acting award (by a group of people who obviously haven’t seen his work in Dracula…. or…. Little Buddha…. or Much Ado About Nothing…. or A Walk in the Clouds) at the Woodstock Film Festival, and Vulture used the opportunity to ask him if he was aware that he’s the star of the internet meme “Sad Keanu.”
Keanu said that his publicist has sort of told him about it, but he didn’t know that there are thousands upon thousands of Photoshopped pictures of him looking sad next to everything from Forrest Gump to crying Dawson. The rest of their conversation went like this:
Seriously, though, this is one of the reasons I think one of the big appeals of you as an actor is that people are always straining to figure out what’s on your mind, what you’re thinking, why you’re sad … There’s thousands of people doing this.
Wow. So, what, now they’re putting me next to other objects?Yes! For instance, right now I’m looking at you in some Banksy graffiti, you next to a panda.
That’s so funny.You with a cheerleader, but you don’t notice her …
Oh, that’s funny. So they like take paparazzi pictures and re-contextualize them? Funny.Exactly.
Well, it sounds like harmless, good clean fun.What do you make of how your fandom is changing?
I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. That one, well, I guess, though, when you think of how bad that stuff can go, that sounds like a pretty good clean fun one to have happening.Given the options …
Yeah, I haven’t seen them. But given the scope and scale of what can happen out there, that sounds like an all right one. It sounds conceptually funny. [Laughs.]
But when Sad Keanu laughed, he still managed to do it while frowning with his eyes and crying with his mouth.
And I hope this means that Keanu isn’t going to start smiling more. Every time Keanu makes a sadface, a happy John Denver song mysteriously shows up on someone’s iTunes library to keep the world’s emotions even and that’s a good thing. The world needs more John Denver…and Sad Keanu.
(Image by iwanttorentawombat)