091019 - Answering how well Keanu plays his characters

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Question on Yahoo!Answers: "Poll: Do you think Keanu Reeves is a talented actor? he's in a lot of good movies...how well do you think he plays his character?"

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Anakin McFly: As a writer who likes observing characters in movies to note mannerisms and speech patterns and other personality traits, to date I still find Keanu to be one of the most versatile in that area.

Perhaps not obviously so, like say Gary Oldman; Keanu's is a more subtle range, often playing variants on a theme (most of his characters are introverts, with notable exceptions such as Ted), and no two of Keanu's characters are exactly alike. They're all unique individuals, and convincing to me.

Often times when people accuse him of playing a particular character badly, it's because the character was written that way. Regarding Hardball, a critic once claimed that Keanu acted too 'schizophrenic' in the role of Conor O'Neill - but having read the script, I thought Conor was a really, really schizo guy and completely nuts, and Keanu had actually sort of tamed that down.

Regarding The Replacements, critics accused Keanu of being unfunny in a comedy, but in interviews with Keanu and the director they talked about how they had wanted his character to be the straight guy in the midst of the comic chaos, and so the unfunny was on purpose.

Keanu was accused of being robotic in Johnny Mnemonic - prior to that movie even being filmed, Keanu had talked about the role in interviews and mentioned how thought of Johnny as not quite human, like a robot, all angles and no emotions, and so he acted accordingly and got duly slammed for wooden acting.

So... yeah. He plays his characters well. It's just that people don't always know what his characters were meant to be like.

Keanu character database -> http://www.whoaisnotme.net/cdb/cdb.htm
My take on his acting style -> http://whoaisnotme.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-keanus-acting-mad-skillz.html
With diagram: http://www.whoaisnotme.net/forums/view.php?threadid=31