Crying girls and bags of fan mail: Remembering Keanu Reeves’ turn in RMTC’s ‘Hamlet’ 30 years later

Keanu Reeves appears in RMTC's 1995 production of “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." (Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre)

In the summer of 1993, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre artistic director Steven Schipper got a programming pitch for his upcoming season.

Director and acting teacher Lewis Baumander told him of a young actor he had in mind to play Hamlet, the Danish king at the helm of the mammoth, four-hour Shakespearean tragedy.

Baumander directed him as a teen in Toronto after he interrupted another actor’s audition for “Romeo and Juliet,” begging to be cast as Mercutio.

“Nobody wants to play Mercutio,” Baumander recalled.

This particular up-and-comer went on to Hollywood but was still keen on reciting Shakespearean soliloquies before walking on set for film roles, Schipper heard.

“He was a real Shakespeare buff, and (Lewis) said he might be interested, so I phoned Keanu.”

Yes, that Keanu.

At the time, Keanu Reeves had captured hearts in films like “Point Break” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”— specializing in a certain breed of SoCal surfer dude who seemed a far cry from anything the bard with the beard could pen.

Still, credits like “Much Ado About Nothing” and “My Own Private Idaho” hinted at a deeper ambition.

The actor also had a film in the can, ready for release that summer—a popcorn action flick called “Speed.”

Intrigued, Schipper gave the then-29-year-old Reeves a call, pitching the role as a way to honour his former director.

Months went by and alas - a voicemail from the elusive star appeared one September day as if sent from the theatre gods.

‘They’re going to try to dissuade me from doing this’

In January of 1994, Schipper flew down to California to have lunch with Reeves in an attempt to woo him for the role.

Schipper had met Reeves years before in Toronto during auditions for a Sam Shepard play. The role went instead to a young woman, and Reeves went off to Hollywood.

Reunited in Venice Beach, Schipper felt the conversation was going well when Reeves asked what would happen if he was offered a really great film role? Could he drop out of the production? How much notice would they need to replace him?

Schipper told him to say no right then and there if there was any chance he couldn’t follow through. After all, he couldn’t promise Keanu Reeves to the RMTC subscribers and not deliver, Schipper told him.

“I saw it clear as day—the look in his eye. He said, ‘If that’s who you are, then I am for you. Don’t talk to my manager. Don’t talk to my agents. They’re going to try to dissuade me from doing this. Let me handle it,” Schipper recounted.

A month later, Reeves inked a contract with RMTC, agreeing to a scale $1,000 a week salary – the same rate any other actor would be paid to appear in the theatre company’s marquee production in the dead of Manitoba’s notoriously cruel winter.

An offer for a really great film did come, by the way—Michael Mann’s “Heat.” Reeves turned down a $6 million paycheck and the chance to star opposite Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, Schipper said, as the shoot conflicted with the “Hamlet” run.

Reeves also told GQ Magazine in a 2019 profile that he was in movie jail, excommunicated at Fox after turning down “Speed 2” to work in Winnipeg.

“I didn’t work with [Fox] again until ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’” he told the magazine.

Still, Reeves didn’t waver on his commitment to Schipper and the RMTC subscribers.

“That’s Keanu Reeves in a nutshell. That is the essence,” Schipper said.

‘No one worked harder than Keanu’

Reeves landed at the Winnipeg airport in December of 1994 to a throng of excited fans, a guitar slung on his back. The crowd, mostly made up of heart-eyed teenage girls, was perhaps a small harbinger of just how high his star had risen in the months since signing on to the gig.

“Speed” came out the previous summer, accelerating its way to over $350 million worldwide - by far Reeves’ biggest box office gross to date.

Schipper, who screened VHS copies of Reeves’ films for the RMTC board who had no idea who their new star was, picked Reeves up from the airport in his Volvo station wagon. Schipper’s wife still jokes they could have sold it down the road for some serious cash.

Thus began a rigorous rehearsal process, all Hollywood treatment left at the studio door.

“Stardom stuff goes away, and we were just a bunch of people working on the play,” Baumander said.

Veteran Winnipeg actor Robb Paterson was among the local cast taking on double and triple duty, playing roles from Ronaldo to Second Grave Digger.

“He was like this young sex symbol, so that was very exciting because he was a real movie star.”

Winnipeg theatre mainstay Richard Hurst volunteered to be Reeves’ réparateur—someone the star could run lines with to ensure he was word-perfect for opening night.

Reeves had learned the bulk of his sprawling soliloquies prior to landing in Winnipeg during three weeks of rehearsals with Baumander at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

“We just worked and worked and worked,” Baumander said. “We went through everything—studying from scratch, constructing argument and rhetorical speech and prose and poetry.”

Ay, there was the proverbial rub for Reeves.

In Winnipeg, the creative team ventured to cut down the hours-long run time, and out the stage door went the iambic pentameter Reeves had toiled over.

“A line cut here and a paragraph cut here and a section cut out here - that drove him crazy,” Hurst said.

The role was a gargantuan task for any actor, much less one who was used to performing for the close-up of the camera lens instead of matinée-goers in the balcony.

Still, the cast of trained theatre actors were impressed with the Hollywood transplant’s commitment.

“No one worked harder than Keanu,” Paterson said.

“There was no slacking off,” Hurst agreed.

“It was just total, complete, utter focus for him. That’s all he thought about. He basically ate, read, slept the script.”

During rehearsals, Paterson hosted the cast for dinner at his home. Reeves came fashionably late with his band “Dogstar” who were in town to visit him.

“He was in the back lane playing street hockey with my son and my son’s friends. My wife kept saying, ‘Keanu, put on this hat, put on these gloves,’ because it was freezing cold.”

Meanwhile, tickets were going like gangbusters, with over 1,000 orders coming from outside of the province alone.

To get a ticket to see Reeves’ “Hamlet,” folks had to subscribe to the whole season, Schipper recalled. Worried the ticket holders from Japan or England wouldn’t similarly fly across the globe to see the other five shows that season, RMTC offered to donate the remaining tickets to those who might otherwise not be able to afford them.

“Of course, everyone did,” Schipper said.

Keanu-mania

The teenage girls were out in full force once again when the curtain lifted on “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” on Jan. 12, 1995.

By Reeves' own account, he struggled.

“On opening night, I couldn’t breathe,” he said in an August 1995 interview with The Virginian-Pilot.

“I had to get over that. I was like a deer caught in the floodlights. I was, kinda, mesmerized. On the second night, I was better. The reviews were bad, understandably, but a few critics came back later in the run and I was better,” he told the newspaper.

“I think a lot of snobs said it wasn’t as good as they had hoped,” Schipper said.

“I think they came expecting Derek Jacobi. They came expecting Kenneth Branagh, and Keanu was going to be Keanu.”

Seemingly undaunted by the attention of the sold-out run, Reeves spent hours after each show in frigid January conditions to ensure every fan who braved the cold got their photo or autograph, while bags and bags of fan mail arrived to Reeves’ dressing room.

“Crowds would develop. It was just women, young girls wanting an autograph and crying,” Paterson said.

A then-14-year-old Cheryl Laplante took the bus with a girlfriend one Saturday morning to wait at the stage door for a chance to meet the ascendant star.

Another pair of awaiting fans got cold and went across the street to warm up in a sporting goods store right before Reeves pulled up in a cab.

“He came right up to us and said hi, shook my friend’s hand, and he signed autographs for us,” she said.

“I asked him if I could take a picture of him with my friend Michelle, and he said sure. He posed for the picture, and then he said, ‘Would you like to take one with me as well?’”

Leah McKetiak, who got to see Reeves perform at a student matinée, went down to the Exchange District as often as she could to seek out another brush with the heartthrob.

“There were lots of girls just hanging around trying to catch a glimpse.”

One day, she and two friends spotted him a block away. They raced over, pens in hand. Reeves graciously obliged McKetiak’s friends’ autograph requests while she hung back.

“I was full-on starstruck. I didn’t end up saying one word to him, and my friends were the ones who were able to brag that they got his signature and got to talk to him, and I just sat there looking like an idiot.”

Thanks to a friend in the cast, siblings Ryan and Jacquie Black got the chance to meet Reeves backstage.

“It was a very brief meeting, only a couple of seconds, but it sort of made Jacquie’s year,” Ryan said.

Jacquie, a television writer and organizer in Manitoba’s music industry, became a lifelong fan. She had pillows with Reeves’ face on it and other Keanu-centric trinkets. She called him her husband.

Jacquie worked as a background actor when Reeves returned to town for the production of the 2018 film “Siberia.”

She snapped a selfie to capture their reunion.

“Two and a half hours with Keanu today! Always entertaining and sweet as hell,” she wrote in a social media post.

In 2022, Jacquie took a painful fall, leading to hospitalization as she suffered extensive internal bleeding.

The city’s manager of film and special events Kenny Boyce got word to Reeves that one of his superfans was gravely ill.

Hours after she died of organ failure, a video of Keanu Reeves arrived at Jacquie’s hospital room, sending his love.

“It was really touching for the family,” Ryan said.

“He was sending his thoughts because he was her favourite person next to her family. I’ve always been a big Keanu Reeves fan ever since.”

The play that continues to live on

Speaking to CTV News Winnipeg from his home in Brampton, a now-retired Schipper can’t quite believe 30 years have gone by since Reeves lifted Yorick’s skull on the RMTC mainstage.

He remains proud of its legacy.

“It was an exciting, exciting Hamlet,” he said.

“The London Times called it one of the five best Hamlets they’d ever seen.”

Judging by that 1995 newspaper article, Reeves has no regrets.

“To play that dude is, well, it’s worth it, in spite of the fact I wasn’t too good at first,” he said.

Although time has moved them both along, Baumander has heard from his former student over the years, be it when he was invited to the “John Wick: Chapter 4” premiere in Toronto or when he got a special shout-out from Reeves during his induction into Canada’s Walk of Fame.

The mentorship is what remains, Baumander said.

“For me, he will always be that young kid with just a burning passion to be an artist in a world that wanted to make him a movie star.”

CTV News Winnipeg reached out to Reeves for comment but has not heard back. Still, if a certain former Prince of Denmark happens to be reading this, please drop us a line.