Matrix Resurrections Star ‘Nearly Peed Himself’ Fighting Keanu Reeves

Jonathan Groff ‘nearly peed himself’ facing off with Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Resurrections.

This isn’t a spoiler, as it’s in the second trailer, but I’ll add the ‘spoiler warning’ anyway: in one scene, Groff’s character screams ‘Mr. Anderson!’ at the top of his lungs, evoking Hugo Weaving’s iconic, suited adversary, and fires a gun. It’s one of the best scenes in the movie, and it was ‘transformative’ for the star.

We sat down with Groff and other actors from The Matrix Resurrections ahead of its release this week. I asked the Mindhunter star how it felt to shout those two words, given the legacy surrounding them.

‘I thought I peed my pants. I screamed that, and I shot the gun, then they said ‘cut!’ and I had maybe just released some rude chakra energy, because there was heat emanating off of my body. It was a transformative moment [laughs],’ he said.

Again, this isn’t a big reveal, as we’ve seen glimpses: Reeves and Groff do fight, and it’s a burst of that old Matrix magic. Taking on Reeves as Neo is probably the coolest thing I can imagine, so I asked Groff, ‘What’s going through your head when filming scenes like that?’

‘I remember making an omelette in the morning and having a coffee in my apartment in Berlin, and just sitting alone thinking… I can’t believe I’m going to fight Neo today. When I rode my bike to set every day, it’s still not landing. The experience of actually doing it was just extraordinary and out-of-body. He’s such a sensitive, present force of nature. It was extraordinary,’ he said.

Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Thomas’ therapist, also told me, ‘I’ll say this Cameron, and I’ve never said this before, I don’t think the sequence as scripted between Jonathan and Keanu was supposed to be as pivotal as it was. The fact that what they did was so good and connected so well, they ended up reducing other sequences because of the power of what that one was. It’s very cool.’

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who plays this movie’s version of Morpheus (there is reasoning for Laurence Fishburne’s absence), also gets to tussle with Neo in the dojo, much like his training in the first film. ‘You’ve gotta pinch yourself every once in a while,’ he said.

‘We were really in it together in those moments in the dojo, because we didn’t have a tremendous amount of time, but we all worked really hard and wanted it to be great. Keanu was an excellent dance partner for those scenes, he worked very hard. There was a give and take relationship there.

‘There are other moments in the film that recall some of the more iconic scenes we know from The Matrix; you come on the cameras and you just let it fly. It’s surreal to be in those spaces, to be sharing those spaces and looking across from Neo… they’re the moments you make sure your feet are on the ground and you just remind yourself these are the special moments you want to hold on to.’

The Matrix Resurrections hits cinemas on December 22.