Keanu: I Think About Death Constantly

Actor/musician Keanu Reeves has a new slash to add to his resume: novelist. And in pushing his first work—a collaboration with UK sci-fi writer China Miéville called The Book of Elsewhere—Reeves has some interesting things to say to the BBC. "I'm 59, so I'm thinking about death all the time," he says, adding that it's not as morbid as it sounds. "Hopefully it's not crippling, but hopefully it's sensitized [us] to an appreciation of the breath we have, and the relationships that we have the potential to have." The topic has a connection to the novel, which centers on an immortal warrior, notes USA Today.

The book is actually an offshoot of Reeves' comic book series BRZRKR ("berserker") about the same character, named Unute. And yes, a live-action film starring Reeves is in the works at Netflix, as is an animated spinoff. In an interview with the New York Times, Reeves recounts how he began thinking years ago about a character who could not die. "It became a series of what-ifs," he says. "What if they were 80,000 years old? Where did this character come from? What if they came from a tribe that was being attacked by other tribes and wanted to ask the gods for a weapon, and what if a god replied, and what if that birthed a half-human, half-god child?"

The full Times profile details the odd—at least on the surface—pairing of Reeves and Miéville, "a Marxist who holds a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics." Related to that, Reeves tells the BBC that it's really Miéville's novel, not his, to which the sci-fi writer objected. "That's putting it too far," he says. "It wouldn't exist in the form without a lot of very thoughtful and careful work with Keanu." (More Keanu Reeves stories.)