Keanu Reeves and China Miéville on co-writing a novel about an 80,000-year-old warrior
In a Q interview, the actor and the speculative fiction author discuss their new book, The Book of Elsewhere
Keanu Reeves has more careers than the average John Wick fan might realize. Beyond starring in action movies, the actor has also produced and directed feature films, and he's dipped a toe into the non-fiction pool, having worked on several documentaries as both a producer and narrator.
But he also has creative endeavours that are outside of film entirely. Reeves has played bass in a grunge band called Dogstar on and off since the 1990s, and he's been a comic book author since 2021. His series BRZRKR follows an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior as he fights his way across time.
Now, Reeves can add novelist to his list of accomplishments. His new book, The Book of Elsewhere, is set in the BRZRKR universe, and was co-written with accomplished speculative fiction author China Miéville. In a recent Canadian broadcast exclusive interview the pair did with Q's Tom Power, Reeves says his desire to constantly search for new creative outlets is "born out of a feeling of pleasure."
"I've just always enjoyed, since I was a little kid, pretending or playing," he says. "Part of the reason [I became] an actor was just an English class, reading Shakespeare aloud. I didn't start playing bass until I was 22, and then once you start playing, you're like, 'Well, let's play a live show.' So I think it's just been a pleasure to just create."
The collaboration between Reeves and Miéville came out of mutual fandom. Reeves says he reached out to Miéville after reading both his novel The City & the City and his book of short stories Three Moments of an Explosion. The actor says the stories in Three Moments were some of the best he ever read.
"His use of metaphor and analogy in these extraordinary circumstances … felt present and vital and alive, and married to these events and circumstances that were so creative and not just your everyday world."
For his part, Miéville says he'd been "a lover of many of [Reeves'] films for a long, long time."
"When I got the initial email, there was this very lovely, very moving moment," the author says. "To realize that someone whose work you really admired liked your [work] is very affecting. So I enjoyed that for a moment, but then very quickly got into the brass tacks of … how do we work? How do we work out if we are actually the right people to work together on this thing? So it was a really, really lovely feeling, but it also quite quickly became very important to me that we sort of approached this with the kind of care and diligence and seriousness that it needed and deserved."
The full interview with Keanu Reeves and China Miéville is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Keanu Reeves and China Miéville produced by Vanessa Greco.
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