Keanu Reeves Almost Wasn't Neo: The Real Story Behind The Matrix's Casting

Picture Neo, and Keanu Reeves shows up in your head almost instantly. That wasn’t always a sure thing. Long before Reeves ever put on that black coat, at least eight other actors had a shot at the role, and a few of them turned it down more than once.

Will Smith Turns Down the Pitch of a Lifetime

By the mid-1990s, the Wachowskis had only one produced movie behind them, the thriller Bound, which drew comparisons to the work of the Coen brothers and convinced Warner Bros. to take a chance on something far stranger next.

That didn’t stop them from pitching a much bigger idea to the studio: a science-fiction story about a computer programmer named Neo who discovers his entire world is a simulation. Their first choice for that role was Will Smith, fresh off the success of Men in Black.

Smith sat through the pitch meeting, but the ideas were hard to picture at the time, especially the concept that would later become the film’s famous slow-motion camera trick, where the action seems to freeze while the camera circles around it.

Smith later explained that the pitch sounded strange on paper, even though the Wachowskis turned out to be right about it. He chose to make Wild Wild West instead, and that movie became one of the biggest box-office disappointments of his career.

Looking back at the decision years afterward, he put it bluntly: “So I made Wild Wild West. I’m not proud of it.” The Matrix, meanwhile, went on to redefine the genre Smith had walked away from.

Nicolas Cage Chooses Family Over a Trip Overseas

Once Smith passed, the Wachowskis turned to Nicolas Cage, who was being considered for The Lord of the Rings around the same period. Both projects meant spending months on end filming abroad — The Matrix in Australia and The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand — and Cage wasn’t willing to make that trade-off while he had a young family at home.

Speaking to MTV years later, Cage explained his thinking: “I had family obligations, so I’m glad I stayed.” With Cage out of the running too, the search for Neo had to start over yet again, and it was about to get a lot more unusual.

The Studio Gets Desperate, Then Creative

That’s when things really got interesting. Warner Bros. executive Lorenzo di Bonaventura later admitted the studio was willing to change Neo’s gender entirely just to fill the role. He sent the script to Sandra Bullock, a longtime friend from Demolition Man and Keanu Reeves’s own co-star in Speed, hoping she might take the part if it were rewritten for a woman.

As di Bonaventura recalled it in an interview with The Wrap, “We went to Sandy Bullock and said we’ll change Neo to a girl.” Bullock passed on the offer and made Forces of Nature instead, a film that did not perform nearly as well, and Neo stayed written as a man.

Two more major stars briefly circled the role around this time. Brad Pitt was busy filming Seven Years in Tibet and was reportedly too worn out to jump into another demanding shoot right after. Pitt confirmed the near miss himself years later, joking, “I took the red pill. That’s the only one I’m naming.”

Leonardo DiCaprio actually agreed to play Neo at first and sat through meetings about the part, only to back out once he realized it meant taking on another visual-effects-heavy movie so soon after wrapping Titanic. Neo wasn’t the only role on the film that took this long to settle, either.

The part of Morpheus was floated to Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, Val Kilmer, and Russell Crowe before it finally went to Laurence Fishburne, and Agent Smith was first offered to Jean Reno, who said no because he didn’t want to leave France for such a long shoot in Australia.

Even Trinity almost went a different way, with singer Janet Jackson reportedly approached before the part went to Carrie-Anne Moss.

More Big Names Enter the Picture

A handful of other names floated around the role of Neo during this stretch, though the details are less certain than the accounts above.

Johnny Depp reportedly came up early on, and some accounts suggest the Wachowskis liked the idea, but Warner Bros. saw him as more of an art-house actor at that point in his career and doubted he could carry a big studio action release.

David Duchovny was considered as well, but he chose to stay focused on The X-Files: Fight the Future instead, a film tied to the TV show that had already made him a household name.

Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and the late Brandon Lee were also mentioned as possibilities while the studio kept looking, though none of those conversations are known to have gone very far. By this point, the Wachowskis had gone through nearly every leading man in Hollywood without landing their star.

Keanu Reeves Finally Says Yes

By the time the Wachowskis sat down with Keanu Reeves, he already had action credibility from Point Break and Speed, along with the goodwill he’d built up from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Reeves has described the meeting as surprisingly casual, recalling that he and the directors ended up talking things through outside their office before shaking hands on the deal. When they told him they wanted four months of training before filming even started, he said yes without hesitation.

“I was very lucky,” he later said of landing the part. Those four months had Reeves learning martial arts under choreographer Yuen Woo-ping and working through a reading list that included Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, preparing him for a film that mixed action with heavy doses of philosophy.

The Matrix opened on March 31, 1999, on a budget of about $63 million, and quickly became a cultural landmark.

It went on to earn more than $460 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Warner Bros. release of that year, and it swept all four of its Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects.

It also became the first film ever to sell a million copies on DVD, a format that was still brand new to most households at the time.

Reeves went on to play Neo in two sequels released in 2003 and, more than two decades later, in a fourth film released in 2021, cementing the role so closely to him that it’s genuinely hard to picture anyone else in it now.

Given how many actors passed on Neo before Reeves ever got the offer, that’s no small achievement, and it’s part of why the story of his casting still gets told more than twenty-five years later.