![]() "You're always fighting for a career," Reeves says. "Yeah."Īlthough disappointments haven't hindered Reeves in pursuing weirder, wilder and more interesting independent releases like A Scanner Darkly and Thumbsucker - a duality that's been a feature of Reeves' career ever since his 1986 breakthrough River's Edge - you get the feeling the last decade hasn't always been plain sailing. "I kind of went to Studio Movie Jail." Odd as it may seem, even for an actor as famous and as enduring as Reeves - 2016 marked his 30th year in film, and his big successes have been really big - he's apparently still only as bankable as his last movie. "Sometimes I call that The Day my Career Stood Still," he says. Until recently, Keanu Reeves's last blockbuster was the The Day the Earth Stood Still, a sci-fi remake released in 2008. Elsewhere, lathes turn and machine presses press. And there are various clients' bikes lined up along the far wall. There's the Goodwood ExperiMental, an eccentrically-built racer they bought to the UK for last year's Festival of Speed in Sussex. There's his current bike, a custom Arch KRGT-1 with 10,000 miles on the clock, in for repairs after the transmission blew. For a working garage, the place is as clean as a museum. He was, like, 'Why do you want to do this?' Then we got to know each other and over the course of it it was just like, 'Come on, man'. "He'd been around motorcycles for years and he knew what it would take. Hollinger told him that wasn't really his thing.) The two got talking and Reeves suggested they might go into business. (He wanted to add a sissy bar, or passenger backrest. Reeves had already logged tens of thousands of miles on Nortons, Suzukis, a 1974 BMW 750, a 1984 Harley Shovelhead and a Moto Guzzi racer, all from his personal collection, before he approached Hollinger to make a modification to his Harley-Davidson. We are talking at the Arch Motorcyle Company, the custom superbike builders Reeves co-founded with his friend Gard Hollinger, a well-known designer in the bike world, in Hawthorne, an industrial suburb south of Los Angeles. Maybe the broken ribs part," he reflects. After the accidents the adrenalin kicks in, so it's not really painful. "This one took a car bumper off," he says. He hoists up the right leg of his battered jeans and shows me thick, knotted tissue running from his ankle to his thigh. For a while he'd joke he worked to pay his motor insurance. Since then there have been other surgeries, fake teeth, veneers. The accident left a thick scar up his abdomen and necessitated the removal of his spleen. ![]() In 1988, he took a hairpin bend too fast and lay on the pavement for half an hour thinking he was going to die. You're moving on the surface of the planet."Īs a hobby it is not without its risks. It's also good to go out and think a little bit, so you can get lost in the now. "It demands a kind of attention and presentness. "It's the physical sensation of riding, the wind, the smell, the sights, the connection to the machine, the living-in-nature," he says. Or just head up to the Santa Monica Mountains and kick around for a while. But when his mood and his schedule allow, he'll head up the coast on Highway One or into the San Gabriel Mountains and the Angeles National Forest where the riding is good, or take Sunset down to the Pacific Ocean. Often it is merely the easiest means of getting from one appointment to another. "It's my preferred mode of transportation," he explains. Keanu Reeves rides a motorcycle every day.
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