(Credits: Far Out / Gabriel Hutchinson / YouTube Still)
Sat 13 December 2025 16:15, UK
You don’t need to list all the very real atrocities going on in the world to convince anyone that existing on Earth in the year 2025 can feel, at best, like trying to meditate while a circus clown throws knives at your head for sport.
No one can agree on anything, opinions are facts if you shout loud enough, and nuclear war is more likely than it’s ever been in five decades, but if there’s one thing that unites us, it’s a collective love for Keanu Reeves.
Here is a man who has been nothing but decent, good-looking, and humble for his entire career, such that it doesn’t even matter if he is a good actor, for he’s a good person (according to a meta-analysis of his public appearances), and that must count for more. Reeves is so beloved that he was cast as a literal angel in the 2025 movie Good Fortune, a stroke of divine casting genius that was only topped by Audrey Hepburn’s turn as a guardian angel in the 1989 movie Always.
It seems almost impossible, then, that someone could publicly admit to disliking such a paragon of our global community, and much as it pains me to discuss this, but there was one person who wasn’t a Reeves fan, and that was the Friends star Matthew Perry. In his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, the actor rattles off a host of grievances and regrets, most of which revolve around his struggles with substance abuse, his unhappy childhood, and the many relationships he tanked along the way.
One passage, however, reads more like a hit job than the rest, and while discussing his love for River Phoenix, he bemoans the fact that “original thinkers” and “really talented guys” like Phoenix and Heath Ledger go down while “Keanu Reeves still walks among us”. He later repeated that sentence when recounting punching a hole through Jennifer Aniston’s dressing room (how charming) when he found out that Chris Farley had died.
Perry is no longer with us, so it’s best to be somewhat measured when reacting to this totally uncalled-for act of stupidity, but seriously, one wonders what he was thinking when he decided to pen this. Well, as it turns out, he wasn’t, because shortly after the book was released, he realised exactly how enormous the fuck-up was, as he tried to save his ass by removing that section from all further editions.
You’d think that this possibility might have been broached in the editing process, but apparently it wasn’t, with the Friends actor claiming that he regretted it and that he’d apologised publicly (though not privately) to Reeves. For his part, Reeves has not commented on Perry’s unprovoked aggression, which is exactly what you’d expect of him.
There is no coming back from that, and you can say what you will about Reeves’s talents or lack thereof as an actor, but no one in their right mind could deny that he is a force for good in this sorry excuse for a society that we must all endure.
The question remains about why Perry was so fixated on him in his memoir when he could have derided any other living male star, and the only explanation is that, as the book proves on nearly every one of its 272 pages, he was aggrieved, angry, and considered himself to be a victim. In other words, he probably just couldn’t handle the idea of an actor being colossally famous without seeming to be ruined or embittered by it.
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