Known for his prominent roles in The Matrix, Speed, and John Wick, Keanu Reeves is an acclaimed Hollywood actor. He’s widely known for his positivity and kindness, an outlook on life that partially contributed to his fame. But his path to stardom had a rough start, due in part to dyslexia.
Reeves was never very good in school, even admitting such. “I was just a little too rambunctious and shot my mouth off once too often. I was not generally the most well-oiled machine in the school.” He explained. He was expelled from one of the schools he went to, and instead tried pursuing a more athletic path, aspiring to become a professional ice hockey player. However, it was his passion for acting that ultimately became his claim to fame. “Because I had trouble reading, I wasn’t a good student,” Reeves explained to Handbag magazine. “I didn’t finish high school. I did a lot of pretending as a child. It was my way of coping with the fact that I didn’t really feel like I fit in.”
It was this talent for pretending that Reeves ultimately turned into an acting career when he was around 15. He enjoyed Shakespeare, in spite of his reading difficulties, saying in a 1994 interview, “I love Shakespeare. When I was 18, I did Romeo and Juliet onstage. It’s very relaxing when you read it out loud. Try it. I really like Hamlet.” Reeves’s acting in stageplays soon turned to movies, and nowadays, he stars in many big-name blockbusters. He’s also turned to philanthropic efforts, supporting many organizations dedicated to cancer research.
It’s undeniable that Keanu Reeves’s dyslexia caused many struggles for him in his early life, but in some ways, it helped pave his way to stardom. His affinity for pretending led him to take up acting, and his dyslexia may have led him to be more visual and physical than verbal, a quality perfect for stage & screen acting. Even though they were hard to go through, Reeves’s struggles and experiences shaped who he is as a person today.