This Hobby Prepared Keanu Reeves for "John Wick" Stunt Driving

Is there any modern actor more beloved than Keanu Reeves? (Even Matthew Perry, recently confessed Keanu hater, apparently decided he was too nice of a guy to insult.) Now there’s another reason to move him to the top of your list of favorite celebrities: he does his own stunt driving.

In John Wick: Chapter 4, it’s been revealed that not only did 58-year-old Reeves do his own fight sequences, but he also learned, practiced and executed demanding car stunts in the franchise’s latest installment. That’s according to Tanner Foust, a professional racing and stunt driver who was hired to work on the car scenes.

“The whole goal of my job, essentially, was not to drive,” Foust told TopGear.com. “I had to put the wig and the beard on and do the stunts, at least once, so it was in the can. But I spent four months in Berlin training Keanu on his days off from fighting.”

Foust is a decorated racer and has worked on movies including The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Iron Man 2 and Ford v Ferrari. Even after all that experience, he said Reeves is “definitely the best of any actor I’ve worked with” when it comes to stunt driving. In drifting specifically, he rates Reeves an eight out of 10.

Keanu is an all-time great action hero, but it’s not necessarily his previous film work that primed him to excel in stunt driving. According to Foust, what gave the actor a leg up was his experience on a different type of vehicle. “[W]hat really helps is he comes from motorcycles, where you learn not to slide the front [tire],” he told TopGear.com. “With cars, if you’ve already learned that, you’re good.”

Keanu Reeves Takes Us for a Ride on His Totally Excellent Motorcycle

Test-driving the new Arch Motorcycle KRGT-1 — with its iconic co-designer in tow

Reeves has been a motorcycle enthusiast for more than three decades, getting into bikes when he was 22 with the purchase of a Kawasaki 600 Enduro. That enthusiasm led to his founding of Arch Motorcycle, his own bespoke bike manufacturer; our correspondent Eric Hendrikx tested out some of Arch’s models in 2019 with Keanu, noting then that “[he] isn’t simply playing with motorcycles here, he’s a lifelong rider and enthusiast who has dedicated decades of attention to the finer details of a motorcycle’s inner workings and handling on the road.”

You never know what hobbies will come in handy later in life. But for anyone out there who has dreams of becoming a stunt driver, maybe take a page from the book of Keanu and start on two wheels instead of four.