From John Wick to Neo to Duke Caboom, Keanu Reeves has played countless iconic characters and spent more than 40 years as a working actor. There’s one non-acting job, though, that he considers his “worst ever.”
Speaking with IGN ahead of the premiere of his new movie Good Fortune, Reeves says that before he became an actor he had a job that he considered “terrible.”
“As a kid I (had) a newspaper route in the winter,” Reeves says. “When it's not quite snowing, but raining– oh man, that wasn't fun. You're 14. The Wednesday paper was big. Then the weekend paper you had to put together, it's raining, it's cold. You're young, you don't know what's going on. I was terrible. I was a terrible at it.”
In Good Fortune, Reeves plays Gabriel, a guardian angel who normally handles texting and driving cases and inserts himself into the life of Arj, a down-on-his-luck gig worker played by Ansari. In the movie, a huge mix-up causes Gabriel to lose his wings and have to work as a dishwasher.
Reeves, who grew up in Toronto, says that even though the weather made his paper route brutal, it wasn’t all bad. “It was good money for a kid, you know what I mean?” Reeves says. “You had to collect. So it was actually a good gig.”
As part of IGN Fan Fest 2025: Fall Edition, Reeves and Good Fortune’s star, writer, and director Aziz Ansari showed off a brand-new clip from the movie. In the exclusive sneak peek, which you can see in the player above, Reeves and Ansari share a scene with Seth Rogen, with whom Ansari’s character switches places due to a mix-up by Reeves’s guardian angel Gabriel. Ansari says that Reeves’s previous roles in comedies helped him land the part.
“Whenever Keanu's name came up to play this part, I revisited his work,” Ansari says. “Specifically comedies like Bill and Ted and Parenthood. He's very funny when he's playing this kind of innocence and naivete. Once Keanu came on board, I think together we really found the character and we dialed it up even further.”
For his part, Reeves says Ansari’s vision of the movie is what made him sign on. “You really need to have a creative vision,” Reeves says. “The director also has to wear a producorial vision. The mood on the set and the whole production (and) the tone come from the director. And he (Ansari) created a really wonderful creative environment and it was really special.”
Good Fortune hits theaters October 17.
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