Keanu Reeves getting cast in Amazon’s Secret Level was a pleasant surprise for us all, but the show’s executive producer thought it was a joke at first
No one should ever joke about casting Keanu Reeves in anything.
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None of us expected someone like Keanu Reeves to appear in an animated short based on Armored Core, and it sounds like Secret Level's executive producer was the most surprised of all.
When Reeves was spotted in that first Secret Level trailer, it obviously came as a bit of a shock - he's a big name actor after all, and even if he's in Cyberpunk 2077, I certainly wouldn't have guessed we'd see him in an Armored Core animated short. Funnily enough, though, when the show's executive producer Dave Wilson was asked if there was a role for the actor, he thought it was just a joke. Wilson recently spoke with GamesRadar alongside creator and Deadpool director Tim Miller, where the two spoke about what it was like bringing Reeves aboard to the project.
"We haven't worked with him before, although I'd met him briefly," Miller shared. "He is a huge animation fan, and he came down to Blur [Studios] to talk to me about a movie, another movie entirely and said, 'What I really want to talk about is Love, Death and Robots. Can you tell me all about it? I love animation.'
"I said, 'Well, we're doing this other thing. Would you want to be in it?' And he said, 'F**k yeah.' I said, 'Do you have anything in particular you want to play?' And he's like, 'No, just put me in coach,' essentially. So I asked Dave, 'If you were to cast Keanu Reeves in the show, what character would he be?' and at first, Dave thought I was joking that Keanu Reeves wanted to be in the show."
Wilson himself went on to note that he remembered things slightly differently, being confused at first because Miller "dictates into his phone", receiving a text that reads "'Hey, do we have anything for piano?' And I'm like, 'What?' And then I realized and then, yes, I didn't believe it." Wilson shared that "Keanu actually came on, it was quite late in the series, and we had all the artwork up on the walls. So there weren't that many episodes left to cast, and so then I would start getting videos from other actors, and I'm like, 'Tim, I don't have any roles left.'"
Obviously there was one quite big role left that they managed to fill with Reeves, and we don't have long to wait to see how he fares, as the show will start airing with its first batch of episodes next week via Prime Video on December 10.