Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves spent his first years being underestimated by people who mistook stillness for absence. Inside three years he was a foolish teenager in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and a young aristocrat in Dangerous Liaisons for Stephen Frears, after which Gus Van Sant cast him in My Own Private Idaho and Bernardo Bertolucci put him in a film about the Buddha. Serious directors kept seeing something the reviews did not.

What they saw is that he plays commitment rather than interiority. Reeves does not indicate what a character is thinking, he simply does the thing, completely, and lets the audience supply the rest. It is why his action sequences are legible when other actors' are not: Point Break, Speed and The Matrix all work because the camera can stay on him and the physical stakes read without a line of dialogue.

The 2000s were long. A stretch of forgettable thrillers, a few misjudged romances, a general sense that the moment had passed. John Wick arrived in 2014 and rebuilt him, not by softening the flatness but by finally writing a character that fit it, a man who barely speaks and is defined entirely by what he is prepared to do. Four films on, he is a genre unto himself, and the amiable public reputation has caught up with the work: The New York Times ranked him fourth among screen actors of this century, and Time listed him among its hundred most influential people. Very few careers get a second act that large.