Filming John Wick: Chapter 4 sounds like it almost broke Keanu Reeves.
Producer Basil Iwanyk revealed that the action star begged to be killed off after filming the latest installment of the long-running franchise.
“After the second, third, and fourth movie, making these films is so exhausting and it destroys Keanu, physically and emotionally,” Iwanyk recently told Collider. “By the end, he’s always like, ‘I can’t do this again,’ and we agree with him. The guy is just a shell of himself because he just goes off and goes for it.”
The John Wick franchise is known for its countless complex fight scenes that often featured Wick facing off against dozens of enemies at a time.
“He was like, ‘I wanna be definitively killed at the end of this movie,'” Iwanyk recalled. “We were like, ‘You know, we’ll leave a 10% little opening.'”
They ultimately settled on an ambiguous ending that suggested Wick had passed away from his injuries. But director Chad Stahelski revealed they also filmed an alternate ending that did not test well with audiences.
Stahelski told Empire magazine earlier this summer that despite everything Wick went through in Chapter 4, he could very well still be alive.
“We had a different ending,” Stahelski said at the time. “[The theatrical ending] was the ending Keanu and I wanted, but we shot a different ending. We shot an ending where you actually saw John Wick at the end of the movie. So it was very clear that he was still alive. The audiences we tested with absolutely preferred the ambiguous ending.”
The director claimed he and Reeves decided to return for another installment after they felt like they hadn’t “stuck the landing” in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. He also said that they agreed before working on the film that it was time for Wick to die.
Reeves has since said he would be open to returning to the character, as long as it means he gets to give him a proper farewell.
“I don’t know, I guess I’m going to have to lean on ‘never say never,’” he told Entertainment Weekly in March. “I mean, I wouldn’t do a John Wick film without Chad Stahelski. We’d have to see what that looked like. For me, it feels really right that John Wick finds peace.”
John Wick 4 is now streaming on Starz.