Credit: Far Out / Alamy
October 23rd, 2026 · 2:30am BST
All it takes is one role to change an actor’s career forever, and Keanu Reeves found his at the perfect time. Three and a half decades later, he’s still dining out on it, as he should be.
Even though he’d already been in River’s Edge and Dangerous Liaisons, playing one-half of the titular duo in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure came with the serious risk of typecasting. Since Reeves was so good at playing someone with little between the ears and puppy-dog enthusiasm, everyone assumed that was him.
That said, he’s never really been able to shake the misconception that he’s an airhead away from the cameras, and following the film’s success, almost everything he was offered was in a similar vein. Kathryn Bigelow had different ideas, though, with the director having a sneaking suspicion he could be an action hero.
He could, obviously, and he’s since gone on to reaffirm himself as one of the genre’s most iconic leading men in titles like Speed, The Matrix, and the John Wick franchise, but none of that would have happened had Bigelow not gone out on a limb and cast him as a man too young, dumb, and full of cum for his own good.
“She had this idea I could play Johnny Utah,” the star reflected. “It changed my life.” It changed a lot more lives than that, too, in a roundabout way, because ten years after Point Break was released, another picture came along that never officially admitted where its influences came from, but it was clear to anyone with a pair of eyes what was going on.
A young, ambitious police officer goes undercover to infiltrate a band of thieves, led by a charismatic figurehead. Not only does he strike up a romance with someone close to the crew, but he finds himself becoming increasingly sympathetic to their cause, with the flourishing bromance forcing him to choose between professional obligation and personal feelings.
Is that Point Break or The Fast and the Furious? The answer is both, and Reeves knew it. “You can almost say that without Point Break, you don’t have The Fast and the Furious,” he mused. “They’re connected, aren’t they, in terms of action?” They’re connected in many more ways than that, with the plots virtually identical from start to finish, even if the rip-off fared exponentially better in the long run.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Point Break didn’t get a sequel, but it did get a remake, which was shite. Fast and Furious, meanwhile, spawned nine sequels and a spin-off, with one last feature on the way. So far, the franchise has earned over $7 billion at the box office, and that doesn’t even include the rest of its revenue streams.
There are multiple TV shows in the works, plus video games and theme park attractions, turning a movie that was loosely based on a magazine article but was otherwise a Point Break plagiarism in every way into one of Hollywood’s most lucrative money-making machines.
