‘John Wick’ Was Written for 75-Year-Old Before Keanu Reeves Joined
Actor Keanu Reeves captivated audiences with the wonderfully violent John Wick. The original movie developed into a franchise with vast potential to expand upon its universe. However, John Wick initially had a 75-year-old lead in the screenplay, but it all changed with Reeves came on board. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how the project changed with the actor’s inclusion.
‘John Wick’ originally had a 75-year-old lead
Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman’s They Shouldn’t Have Killed His Dog: The Complete Uncensored Oral History of John Wick, Gun Fu, and the New Age of Action (via Entertainment Weekly) explained how the John Wick lead was actually about a 75-year-old man before Reeves joined the cast. The screenplay was originally called Scorn, and producer Basil Iwanyk gave a bit of insight into how it evolved from there.
“One of my best friends is Charlie Ferraro at UTA, who sent me this script from Derek Kolstad called Scorn,” Iwanyk said. “The lead was a 75-year-old man, 25 years after being retired. It was the fun of watching Clint Eastwood kick ass. I thought, OK, there’s probably one or two names you could do this with: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford. Other than that, I’m not sure how I put this movie together. But the tone of the script for John Wick was subversive and really fun. It has a very clear emotional throughline and a great premise for an action movie.”
However, writer Derek Kolstad explained that he actually went with the lowest offer available for John Wick for a long-term plan.
“My agent at the time, Charlie Ferraro, came to me with five offers for the script, and he didn’t tell me the first four,” Kolstad said. “He said, ‘They’re huge, but you should really take the lowest-paying one, because they want to make the movie now. If you want to have a career as a writer, we should take this.’ You know you have a good agent when he’s looking at the long game. John Wick was sold in February, and the movie came out in November. That never happens.”
Keanu Reeves collaborated on the ‘John Wick’ script
They Shouldn’t Have Killed His Dog explored how Reeves became part of the collaboration. He didn’t simply act in the movie but ultimately changed the course of the entire script. Basil brought the script to him and he loved the overall journey that the character moves through, including the den of thieves.
“We had talked internally about actors, but it was Keanu Reeves — a voracious script reader; anything he gets his hands on, he reads — who got his talons into it and made it his own,” Kolstad said. “I spent two months at Keanu’s house on the weekends working on the script. When I first went and met with him and walked into his house … I see he has 300 screenplays stacked on his desk because … He reads them all.”
Kolstad continued: “And so think that he read something on a Friday, in 90 minutes, and was like, ‘I want to do it.’ In that moment, before I met and really clicked with him, I was like, ‘Yeah, I really want to do it, too.’ The first thing that Keanu said to me was, ‘OK, Derek, I’m going to play him 35.’ And I’m like, ‘Fine.'”
The universe grew far beyond the initial action movie
John Wick revitalized Reeves’ career and built him back up as one of the biggest action movie stars around. It transformed into a franchise where each installment exceeded its predecessor in scope, scale, and brutality. John Wick 4 and 5 are still slated to hit theaters in the future, along with a television spinoff series titled The Continental.
A John Wick spinoff starring Ana de Armas as a young female assassin seeking revenge is also in the works. It turns out that Kolstad got the very best deal that he could have imagined.
